Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

[Caution: Full of spoilers]

The climax of the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, sees twin Nicolas Cages in conversation. One Cage, Charlie Kaufman, confesses his admiration for his brother Donald, whose seeming obliviousness protects him from harm. Charlie remembers a moment from their younger years when Donald was in love with a girl who, along with her friends, ridiculed him behind his back. Donald says he was not oblivious, but rather that his love was his and her response was her business. The emotional climax of the speech is when Donald tells his brother, “You are what you love, not what loves you.” I can’t help but feel that Greek Love by Katherine Dunn serves as a significant precedent to Adaptation and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, though Dunn’s work so disturbs me that it will linger in my memory for, I’m sure, decades to come.

At its core, Geek Love is a family chronicle that documents the Binewskis, who tour their Fabulon circus across the United States. The father, Al, and the mother, Crystal Lil, use chemical and medical experimentation to create freakish progeny to attract audiences to their show. Of the surviving children, there are four or five for most of the book. From eldest to youngest, there is Arturo, “Aqua Boy”, who has fins and flippers where most people have limbs, conjoined piano-playing twins Iphigenia and Elektra, albino hunchback Olympia (the narrator for most of the text), and Fortunato (Chick), a seeming “norm” who has telekinetic abilities. The novel also runs parallel along two timelines; in the present, Oly has a daughter with a tail, Miranda, who was adopted at an early age and who, working at a strip club, has been approached by a wealthy benefactor with the offer to remove her tail. The past more thoroughly details the family’s growth and decline as a family carnival.

What begins reasonably innocuously—Al calls his children “dreamlets” since he and Lil dreamed them up, which I find so endearing—quickly becomes haunting. The more you reflect, the more you realize how awful these characters are. The most obviously evil is Arty, who I would argue is one of fiction’s most horrific villains, but Oly and Chick engage in their fair share of immorality. Love twists the family. Arturo becomes a cultish figure because he has an insatiable desire to be loved. Meanwhile, Chick and Oly do his bidding because they love him. Despite Arty seeing his siblings as disposable, they define themselves by their love of him and tend to him, and it gives the adage from Adaptation a haunting, ominous quality.

Katherine Dunn’s gift in this novel is creating such twisted figures—their physical deformities are irrelevant: what is truly twisted is the logic of love throughout the book. The family engages in a kind of race to the bottom. Early on, the family is attacked by a man who shoots each of them, but none of them fatally. Oly narrates her conversation with Arturo: “Arty narrowed his long eyelids and said I was flattering myself and there was nothing about me special enough to make anybody want to kill me. Arty was the master deflater, but his reaction convinced me only that he didn’t want to kill me. Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us” (85). The characters strive to be freakish; Katherine Dunn inverts society’s general perspective: being ‘normal’ is seen as the worst thing to be. (As an aside, I would also point to Katherine Dunn’s mastery of the craft, which reveals itself upon rereading. In this passage, Dunn refers to Arty as the “master deflater.” Later, he does something horrific to the twins and Elly is described two hundred pages later as being “reduced [...] to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of decayed zucchini” (272), as if her head has deflated. Brilliant, subtle touch.)

Two contradictory impulses turn Arturo into a sinister, horrific character. On the one hand, he refuses to be anything but the most exemplary “freak.” Any time someone starts to seem more freakish than him, he prevents their success. Most obviously and dramatically, Arturo attempts to suffocate his younger brother Chick when he realizes the implications of Chick having telekinetic powers. He also places anonymous calls to ensure that Chick’s pickpocketing and gambling fixing rackets are stopped and that his and his father’s life are threatened. It’s implied that he also previously murdered a younger sibling that was born crocodile-like and threatened to impinge on his Aqua Boy show. The other side of this exceptionalism, though, is that Arturo and their audience buy into an ethos of wanting to be most strange, most freakish. In fact, Arty turns his circus act into a gospel where he targets a miserable woman and tells her she wants to be like him—he essentially hypnotizes her and tells her that if you are deformed, you are liberated from the complete banality of ‘norm’ existence. You become elevated by distinguishing yourself from others. Arturo establishes a cult, making the carnival more and more of his personal recruitment tool. His adherents, wanting to be just like him and not like the normals slowly and sequentially have their limbs amputated: novices remove their fingers and toes and the Elevated have hacked away at their bodies so thoroughly that they are heads and torsos, wrapped in bandages in retirement homes. It’s revolting seeing how persuasive Arturo is and the willingness of his followers to remove their limbs on purpose.

The entire storyline of Arturo’s cult is disturbing in its own right, but isn’t without its real world parallels. The cult of personality he inspires in others as he commands their subservience and his Machiavellian machinations draws clear parallels with fascist figures past and present. At one point, there’s a journalist following Arturo and his notes replicate their lively conversations. In one point, Arturo expounds a Nietszchian slave mentality that feels a little too real:

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him. (227)

But Arturo gets worse. Dunn crafts the story masterfully, where there are just enough moments of foreshadowing to anticipate what will happen, but giving enough freedom to titillate readers with possibilities. The man who tried to murder the Binewskis later murders his wife and attempts to take his own life, accidentally rendering his face into an unrecognizable mush. He gets a job with the carnival to serve as a security guard to Arty. The Bag Man, so called, demonstrates the same devotion as the others but also loves the twins. To spite them for their success, Arty arranges for the Bag Man to marry the twins against their will. When they protest, he sends a threat disguised to sound conciliatory. There’s a Chekhov’s gun moment where I felt the anticipatory thrill of speculation—who is going to get shot? How is it going to happen? I’ll spare you the details of my own theories.

Long story short, the Bag Man impregnates the twins, who do not agree on whether they want the child. Arturo makes arrangements under the guise of providing them with an abortion, but behind the scenes has been asking the doctor about whether it would be possible to separate them. She tells him it isn’t so he asks whether it would be possible to just get rid of one of them. When she asks which one, he says it doesn’t matter. I find his callousness so haunting. Elly is lobotomized and Iphy carries the deflated head on her shoulder, having to manually move the limbs that Elly used to control. It gets even more disturbing when Elly tries to ‘come back’ from her lobotomy, assisted by Chick’s telekinesis. I won’t ruin the climax of the book, but it made me want to throw up with how uncomfortable it was.

On the topic of Chick’s telekinesis, I thought it was a really compelling account of the power. He describes reality like water. It wants to move but is held in containers: “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction” (109). He describes himself as “the plumbing that lets it flow through [...] But the wanting to move is in the thing itself” (109). I liked how Dunn inverts how I typically think of telekinesis. Rather than telekinesis forcing objects to move, it’s more like permitting things to do what they would want to do. This essentially gives Chick godlike powers—even over life and death, as we see in several parts of the book. Yet, it’s tastefully understated; Chick truly has the powers but it’s Arturo whose influence wins out—mainly because Fortunato is so empathetic and feels the pain of things doing what they would prefer not to.

If I have one complaint about the structure of the book, it’s that the climax happens a little too suddenly. There’s such a glorious build-up but the final ‘event’ happens with minimal explanation. It’s the one place where the breadcrumbs could have been planted a little more thoroughly. That being said, there’s still an incredible haunting moment where many people are killed, among whom is Al. Crystal Lil has thoroughly declined into dementia and she

runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse---pulls her skirt down---hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, ‘Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore---not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’” (320-321)

Like so many others in the text, this moment inspires equal parts empathy and revulsion. It gives the ending a more tragic quality, where otherwise it might have been more appropriate to cheer for fictional villains being stopped. I feel badly for Lil, who has been lost to herself through such frequent drug use.

Overall, the book is exemplary in its characterization, its plot, and its thematic developments. The children’s secret lives create the perfect context for engaging betrayals. There’s a great comment early on when Oly says, “it is [...] the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality” (105). Lil and Al are increasingly disconnected from the goings-on at the carnival and are oblivious to the downward spiral of the family. Oly notes, “it is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood” (105). The aphorism seems to speak to Oly as a character, as well. She has the level of awareness that what she’s doing is wrong and deigns to hide it, but continues to do Arty’s bidding. In the closing pages of the book, she expresses some of her conflicted feelings about Arturo:

I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. (315)

If we are what we love, not what loves us, then Oly is a megalomaniacal sociopath and Arturo is nothing. He seems to express some guilt over what he did to Elly—but I don’t buy it. I think even his guilt is a tactic. Oly is drawn into loving Arturo’s weakness but her empathy for him leaves a string of bodies in their wake. In a number of ways, empathy for one another is what destroys the family. Arturo cannot stop being nothing because he loves nothing—he relies on the love of others and can only define himself as the leader that demands devotion and never provides it.

Even in the frame narrative, Olympia’s morality is complex and twisted. As OI mentioned, the book is framed by Oly secretly monitoring the daughter she gave up for adoption now that her daughter is in art school. A wealthy woman offers to pay Miranda money to remove her tail—it seems to be a win-win: she can make $10k and she can be a ‘normal’ woman. Oly takes it upon herself to ensure that the surgery never happens. On the one hand, it is redemption for preventing Miranda the trauma that Arturo imbued to so many others. On the other hand, he is taking away Miranda’s choice, imposing freakishness onto her when she would prefer to just be ‘normal’. The questions of autonomy, manipulation, and choice are complex, making the ending just as uncomfortable as the rest of the book.

Despite the discomfort Dunn inspires, there are a number of reflections that are so poignant that it’s hard to deny the deeply human quality of the book. It’s weird and subversive but it reads like capital-L Literature. Towards the end of the book Olympia reflects on her upbringing. She tells Miranda

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, ‘lived,’ unless the place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires. (321)

The passage comes towards the end of the book, but reads like the opening reflections to a Victorian Bildungsroman. It also makes me more empathetic to Oly, putting her trauma in perspective. Of course she would do what Arty wants—it was the surest way to ensure herself a place in the family and a home. She elaborates on how uncomfortable it is to be inside a home. It gives her a kind of self-consciousness hitherto unknown: “This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there” (322).

Geek Love is a house that let me walk inside and stand there. It inspired the same discomfort. The same uncertainty. It’s a book that made me question my values and morals, the limits of my empathy. It’s a book that disturbs me not only because the characters are so malicious and sadistic towards each other, but because it makes me confront the full implications of my values and ethics, the boundaries of what love entails. Geek Love is truly a one of a kind work, a work of freakish originality. I am so grateful it was recommended to me.

Happy reading!