Books : An Unbelievable Tale of a Family of Carnival Freaks

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 348 pages)

First you have to imagine a carnival show, with a very lovable paterfamilias named Al (married to loving and tender Lillian), who, because the family’s got to live some way, doses up his compliant wife on every horrid drug they can think of, so that their children won’t have to learn a trade--they’ll be born with it, their very own “freak” career--and the family will be able to stay together forever under a happy, traveling roof, an elite group of outcasts, journeying through the wasteland of “norms” that is heartland America.

The narrator here is a middle child, Olympia, a nice girl who barely “made the cut.” (Any normal children born to Lil and Al get abandoned by the roadside. Some of Al and Lil’s kids, on the other hand, are too strange to live; they lie dead, floating in murky jars, where they too can be viewed for a modest fee.)

Be that as it may, Olympia is run-of-the-mill: A hunchback Albino dwarf, bald, with bright red eyes. Oly’s siblings include a pair of very sweet Siamese twins who share one torso, one set of legs, and late in the book have one enormous baby, Mumpo. Olympia also has a kind of thalidomide-variant older brother named Arturo who’s made up of a torso, a pair of flippers and a very evil mind. Finally, she has a nice younger brother named Fortunato, or “Chick,” who appears so “normal” that he’s almost abandoned, but that would have been a big mistake on the part of Lil and Al, since Chick has telekinetic and healing powers, and is terribly nice besides.

Seedy Boarding House

The novel begins in the fictional present, when disaster has already befallen the traveling show. Olympia now lives in a seedy boardinghouse with her demented mother. Upstairs, totally unaware that the Albino dwarf she’s acquainted with is actually her mother, Lil and Al’s grandchild works as a stripper and lives a harmless, uneventful life. Young Miranda is beautiful and kind and has nothing to mark her as particularly strange except for a cute, curly tail.

The plot, then, in the present, is: A large, rich, unattractive lesbian heiress to a fast-food fortune has been finding pretty girls and paying them to have their breasts removed--to be chopped down past the essentials, as it were. This mean woman has almost persuaded Miranda to go along with the paring away procedure--to have her tail removed. It’s Olympia’s God-given task to protect her child from this abomination.

The large lesbian, ironically, has learned her bad tricks from a member of Olympia’s family. The body (so to say) of “Geek Love” occurs in the past, when Arturo, the boy with the flippers and the bad disposition, invented a kind of ad-hoc religion that involved his followers getting their fingers and toes lopped off one at a time, then their thighs and forearms and so on, so that they might live, finally, in a nursing home with just their torso and head, in a state of P.I.P. (“Peace, Isolation and Purity”). Obviously, in the long run, no good could come of this, which is one reason Olympia lives away in that boardinghouse with her mother and daughter.

Imitates Nathanael West

The material here is straight Nathanael West: “Geek Love” is, in a sense, an uneasy marriage of West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “A Cool Million, or, the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin.” The tone is something else: That a “freak” can experience love as well as a “norm” may be one message here--except that Arturo is certainly the meanest freak who ever came down the pike. Another theme has to do with completion: How many body parts does it take to make a genuine human?

I had a lot of trouble with this book--although Katherine Dunn is a powerful and interesting writer. “Geek Love” is too long, too obviously derivative, and I had trouble believing all those “freaks” in the first place. Their souls, as well as their bodies, seemed out of kilter. I didn’t believe the twins, or Arturo, or Lil or Al. And isn’t that the first requirement of any carnival--that the customer believe the glittery, murky life that, half-shaded, goes on behind the soiled curtains of the side show?