Review: Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s subversive cult classic, has been re-released by Abacus Books in a handsome 25^th anniversary edition, with a new introduction by the author. The story of a family of carnival performers who spawn a grotesque cult, Geek Love remains relevant and powerful today.

When Dunn began working on the novel, ‘geek’ had two meanings; popularly, ‘geek’ was used as a putdown, ‘a cruel jab ascribing a personality defect or social handicap… it carried overtones of arcane obsession, but it also reeked of acne, wretched hygiene, and unsavoury personal habits’. The original meaning was more specific: it referred to a circus performer whose act involved biting the heads from live chickens. Nowadays, the word has been reclaimed as a term of pride. IT innovators and cultural trendsetters refer to themselves as geeks with only the slightest hint of self-deprecation. Perhaps by the time we reach Geek Love’s fiftieth anniversary, a fourth meaning will have arisen.

Here, though, Geek is used very much in the original sense. The geek in question is Crystal Lil, the matriarch of the Binewski family. Descended from a wealthy Boston family, Lil joined Aloysius Binewski’s travelling fairground as a young woman, and quickly became known as the most stylish of all the geeks. Dressed in ‘low-necked, slit-to-the-thigh, silky tatters’, she dispatched her prey with ‘a snap and twist of the wrist… a vampire flick of the jaws over a neck’. She married Aloysius, and began ‘experimenting with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides and eventually radioisotopes’ during her many pregnancies, in the hope that she would produce enough grotesque offspring to keep the crowds coming through the turnstiles.

The Binewski clan are the model of a post-nuclear family. Joining Lil and Al are Arty, born without limbs; Elly and Iphy, Siamese twins; Oly, an albino hunchback dwarf who acts as the main narrator; and Chick, originally written off as a ‘norm’, but eventually revealed as the most powerful of them all.

Geek Love’s strength comes from the bold way in which Katherine Dunn inverts the traditions of the American Dream: we see students from Yale and Harvard clamouring to join the fairground as ‘slumming summer geeks’, and aristocrats gleefully rushing over to the wrong side of the tracks, as if to the manor born. The Binewskis become a paradigm of family values, working together for a common cause, self-sufficient and free from the traps of land and property.

Even their deformities become a badge of strength. Like the protagonists of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Binewskis become free by making monsters of themselves. Individuality is prized over the urge to conform. In his lecture ‘An Evening With The Naked Civil Servant’, Quentin Crisp described a character known as The Angel. The Angel was a short, stocky man, bald-headed but otherwise covered with fur. His appearance was so shocking that when his employer first set eyes on him, she fainted. ‘Nevertheless,’ Crisp explained, ‘he made more money in four short years as a wrestler than the divine Joe Louis made out of a lifetime in the boxing ring’. The key was that The Angel took his defining characteristic, ‘that which made him so like himself,’ and placed it in its appropriate setting. Rather than trying to cover up what nature had given him, he foregrounded it: in Crisp’s terminology, he was ‘swimming with the tide, but faster’.

This is originally the driving force behind the Binewskis, too. Arty, however, becomes jealous of his sisters’ ability to draw crowds, and seeks to use his deformities to gain power over others. Enlisting the help of a bizarre medic Dr P, and manipulating Oly and Chick into supporting him, Arty begins to develop his own cult of personality, encouraging the lonely and vulnerable to undergo surgical procedures, shedding fingers, toes and limbs to become parodies of himself. The camp followers drawn to this cult hinder the family’s freedom to move from town to town, and deformity becomes a new brand of conformity as Arty’s megalomaniac impulses blossom.

By manufacturing freaks on an almost industrial scale, Arty is unconsciously bringing about his own downfall. He is now a member of a tribe, rather than a unique specimen, and he becomes increasingly intolerant of dissent, turning on his own family members if they refuse to comply with his plans for them. The outsider has become obsessed with power, and his hubris is swiftly followed by nemesis. While he and his family roamed freely across America, masters of their own destiny, their grandchildren and spiritual descendants are confined to working in strip clubs, packaged and commodified for general consumption.

Authenticity is crucial here; there is a distinct hierarchy between the born freaks and the imitators: as Arty himself observes, ‘a true freak cannot be made. A true freak has to be born’. Characters may transition from the ‘norm’ world to the carnival, but this rarely ends happily. Passage in the opposite direction is regarded as weakness. Most dangerous of all are the demagogues who promote physical alteration as a lifestyle choice; even Lil’s attempts at genetic engineering are fraught with risk, and many of her children fail to survive.

The issue of physical appearance and uniformity is explored further in an intriguing subplot. Here, a wealthy businesswoman, Miss Lick, encourages women to have cosmetic surgery with the aim of removing the characteristics which make them desirable to, or exploitable by, men. For example, a woman with a large bust is offered surgery which will make her flat chested, in the belief that it will force her to become self-reliant: ‘if all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness), they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their own talents and intelligence to become powerful’. Miss Lick encounters one of Crystal Lil’s grandchildren, Miranda, in a strip club, and offers her cash to undergo surgery to turn her into a ‘norm’; Miranda is torn between her genetic ‘wildness’ and the possibility of easy acceptance within ‘norm’ society.

Although some of the concerns which would have resonated with Geek Love’s early readers, such as the Thalidomide scandal, may be less relevant to a modern audience, the novel has also taken on new meanings. Increasingly, television shows teach us that physical transformation is the route to a mental wellbeing and social success, while pressure is put on young women to conform to particular types. At the same time, subcultures are being bought into the mainstream by businesses eager to exploit cultural capital for commercial gain. Identities have become products to be bought off the shelf, rather than ingrained facets of our identities. Geek Love anticipated these developments and the powerful sense of individuality encapsulated in Katherine Dunn’s novel still feels as strong 25 years after the initial publication. Geek Love is a grotesque masterpiece, vivid and strangely beautiful, and deserves to be hailed as a modern classic.