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March 31, 2004Weak "Geek Love"...
I read Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love" on Monday, and I have to admit, for it being a National Book Award finalist, I was let down.
Dunn is a very good writer, and I have no beef with her craft or her workmanship. My main complaints are with the characters, who, for all their sideshow freakishness, never managed to make me care about them. I also wasn't too fond of the narrator, a character of peripheral importance in the story. Like everybody else in the sideshow family, she sits back and allows her smarmy fish-brother to evolve from punk teenager into a meglomaniacal cult leader. Her love for said brother was rolled out as the source of her passivity, but I was never given reason to believe in it--and it didn't justify why everybody else let the kid do whatever he wanted, too.
"Geek Love" ended quickly, and weakly, and without me caring a whit about any of the paths the character had taken. The book annoyed me more than a poorly-written book would. Dunn clearly knows her craft, so when you fail to connect with the characters, you can't help but assume it was a conscious choice on her part.
Looking over the reader reviews on Amazon.com, people seem to fall into three camps on the topic of "Geek Love": those who gush that it's the best book they've ever read, those who were too horrified by the subject matter (which, admittedly, makes Palahnuik's stuff seem a little sedate by comparison) to judge it as a text, and those who didn't feel that the book deserved its hype. I'm of that last camp, obviously.
Posted by patrick at March 31, 2004 09:34 PM
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