Geek Love

I have read a number of strange books over the years but I don't know that I've ever found the equal of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love: A Novel. This is the tale of the Binewski family, a traveling troop of carnival freaks. The siblings -- an albino, hunchbacked dwarf, a pair of conjoined twins, the flippered Aqua-Boy and the paranormally gifted young Chick -- are intentionally created by their parents through a series of chemical experiments conducted during Lil's pregnancies. The more outlandish the bodies of their children, the happier they are with the (profitable) results.

The novel is, especially at the start, scintillating, replete with details that shocked, repulsed, and compelled me. I can think of few works of art or literature more fully embodying Julia Krisetva's notion of abjection, which she characterizes at "the fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from" phenomena in the world.

But really, the proprietors of freak shows knew about abjection long before Kristeva introduced the scholarly world to the notion.

The narrator is Olympia the dwarf, who plays barker and errand runner for her more "gifted" siblings. We move back and forth between her adult present and her childhood past in a layered narrative replete with disturbing revelations (e.g. the scene in which the surviving kids polish the glass jars housing their less fortunate siblings).

The more we get to know the Bineswkis, the more we find (echoing medieval notions of the interior and the exterior) that their "distorted" bodies house disturbed personalities. As Arturo the Aqua-Boy begins his cult (read it, you'll see), we could use more of an answer to why the disenfranchised find his message so compelling, though his own reasons are more clear.

While the end of the novel cannot live up to its powerful opening, even so, it is well worth reading. Give it a chance, but brace yourself.