Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is one of the craziest, most intense reading experiences you will ever have. After all, any book that takes place within a traveling carnival and features a family of sideshow freaks is pretty much going to be a psychedelic experience. Dunn’s triumph, however, is that she is able to convert the reader’s strong visceral reactions to the monstrous images and events into an equally strong emotional bond with the fabulous and shocking characters.

A quick run-through of the premise: The Binewskis are a carnival family who save their traveling “Carnival Fabulon” from bankruptcy by giving birth to their own stable of freaks—the children born to Lil Binewski after she ingest drugs, insecticides, arsenic, radioisotopes, and the like. Each member of the family, freakish in his or her own way, follows an inevitable path forged by his own inescapable character. Publisher’s Weekly describes the result much better than I could:

"This audacious, mesmerizing novel should carry a warning: 'Reader Beware.' Those entering the world of carnival freaks described by narrator Olympia Binewski, a bald, humpbacked albino dwarf, will find no escape from a story at once engrossing and repellent, funny and terrifying, unreal and true to human nature. Dunn's vivid, energetic prose, her soaring imagination and assured narrative skill fuse to produce an unforgettable tale… This raw, shocking view of the human condition, a glimpse of the tormented people who live on the fringe, makes readers confront the dark, mad elements in every society."

My own emotional relationship with this book is strengthened tenfold by the circumstances under which I came to own it. No less bizarre, really, when you think about it, than the outlandish events within the novel.

The year was 2000, and I was “managing” a recording studio in Oakland (it being my first studio job, I was ostensibly more learning than managing). The owner of the studio was an heir to the fortune of a prominent industrial manufacturing company, and my guess is that the money funding the studio came from this source, because there sure weren’t enough customers to pay for the top-of-the-line equipment and facilities we had. The parent manufacturing facility was a few blocks away from the studio, and we often ran over to “the offices” for FedEx drop offs and office-related services. It was there that I met my boss’ older brother, who was handling the (real) family business.

The brother was everything my boss was not. While my boss was a solidly built, red-meat-eating man’s man who would have preferred a boxing match to a game of Scrabble, his brother was thin and wiry, quick-witted and sophisticated. And he was missing an arm.

Having only one arm didn’t seem to slow the brother down at all. He seemed perfectly competent to run the entire manufacturing operation without it, and in his relationship with my boss, he was definitely the dominant of the pair. Not only was he older, but he was running a successful business. The unspoken understanding was that he thought his little brother a dilettante, playing with his little recording studio while he did the real work and brought in the family’s money. He was very friendly to me, however, and stopped by the studio to hang out every once in a while. I did notice that as the holidays approached, he was coming by more and more often.

It was right around that time that I gave my two weeks’ notice. The shallow, materialistic music industry culture was getting to me, and the woman who was hired to be my mentor refused to work with me cordially after the first day we met, when, in response to a few of my interruptions, she snapped, “Stop asking so many questions. You don’t learn from asking questions. You learn from listening.”

Thus it was that I had two weeks left in December at the job when my boss’ brother asked me if I wanted to have lunch with him. I honestly don’t remember what went through my mind at that moment, but I sure wasn’t doing anything at work, and he was nice enough. I knew that I wasn’t interested—he was way too old for me—but I think he was making an effort to keep it friendly, so I said yes.

At lunch, we talked a lot about the studio and my boss. He felt that my boss was just playing at running a company, as evidenced by my botched mentoring experience, losing me as an employee, and not getting the customers in. He was so disgusted that, after most of our lunch hour had passed, he suggested we cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco to get a drink at a great bar in North Beach.

The next thing I knew, we were parallel parking on Columbus, and we walked past City Lights to the nearby bar called Vesuvius. We had a drink, chatted some more, and then headed back up the street to the car. “Wait,” he said as we approached City Lights. “There’s a book you have to read. Let’s see if they have it.” We went into the famed bookstore and he found what he was looking for right away: Geek Love. He bought it for me.

As we approached his car, his cell phone rang. “It’s my brother,” he said, looking at the caller ID. He ignored it. I looked at my watch and saw that we had been gone for almost two hours. A few minutes later, as we navigated the city streets, the cell phone rang again. “It’s my brother again,” he muttered as he answered it.

“Yeah, she’s here,” I heard him say. It was one of those conversations where you didn’t need to hear the other end. “Oh, lighten up. It’s just lunch.” Pause. “Just chill, OK? I’ll get her back when I get her back.” He hung up and looked at me. “Don’t worry, I can handle him. He’s just being an ass about it.”

Now I was a little uneasy. Sure, I was on my way out the door, but I did still work for the studio. There was, however, a little comfort in that I was with the only person who had some sort of personal authority over my boss. As I mused, the phone rang again. “What?” is all he snapped into the phone. He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, what are you going to do about it? Oh, please… what sort of important work am I keeping her away from?” Nothing, really. I didn’t do much there and he knew it. “No, that is the point. I’m going to hang up now. We’ll get there when we get there.”

I couldn’t believe I had gotten myself into this situation. He tried to reassure me that my boss was just blowing smoke, and really, he wasn’t mad at me at all. It was a brother thing. And as he said that, the phone rang again. He didn’t answer it this time.

When we pulled into the parking lot of the studio, my boss was waiting outside, livid. But his brother was right: he wasn’t angry at me. I slipped past into the building, still clutching my book, and let the two duke it out between themselves. I was too embarrassed to stick around.

I spent the rest of the two weeks keeping a low profile, trying to avoid both my boss and his brother as much as possible. I have never talked to either of them since, but this incredible novel, Geek Love, will forever remind me of my boss’ one-armed brother.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

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