The Osbournes Meet The Waltons

Geek Love
By Katherine Dunn
Vintage Contemporaries,
348 pages
Available at Powerbooks

The Binewskis are in show business. That’s about the only normal thing you can say about them, because the business they’re in is a traveling freak show with most of the Binewski family members as main attractions.

There’s Arturo, the flippered oldest son known as Aquaboy; Oly (short for Olympia), a hunchbacked albino girl; the conjoined sisters, Issy and Elly; and Chick, a physically normal specimen who possesses telekinetic powers. And behind it all are Al and Lil: proud and loving parents of their own personal circus show.

It takes a while to accept the upside-down world presented in Katherine Dunn’s acclaimed novel, Geek Love. The author, too, is in the tall-tale business, so her prose is angular and bawdy, racing and rollicking. It’s like a funhouse mirror, with fewer laughs than gasps.

Leave your PC-meter behind, and you may come to enjoy this tale of love, loyalty and fair play among the misshapen and physically deformed. Lil herself is a Boston socialite who joins the circus only to quickly reveal her latent talent for geekdom: biting the heads of live chickens, that is.

"When your mother was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’"

This same Crystal Lil, our star-haired mama, sitting snug on the built-in sofa that was Arty’s bed at night, would chuckle at the sewing in her lap and shake her head. "Don’t piffle to the children, Al. Those hens ran like whiteheads."

No, they’re not The Osbournes; and theyí’re certainly not The Waltons. The Binewskis are somewhere in between.

Early on, we learn how the Binewskis came to generate their – ahem – family tree. When the old circus attractions would run off or get married, Al and Lil devised a plan to repopulate the tent: they would dose the pregnant mother with arsenic, amphetamines and radioisotopes – a concoction guaranteed to produce birth defects of wondrous splendor.

Naturally, they anxiously await each new birth, inspecting the infant for tails, flippers, extra eyes and other exotic features. And they’re sickly ill when they produce a perfectly healthy, unexceptional baby – a "norm," as they call it.

If the notion of mothers praying for birth defects seems cruel or remarkably tasteless, you may be missing the underlying point of Geek Love. Novelist Dunn is interested in our reactions to the physical, and how we often miss the underlying normality in abnormal lives. There’s a neck-and-neck race in Geek Love between acceptance of such physical conditions and exploitation of them. But you have to admit: after a while, the reader stops viewing the Binewskis as any different from other families – bearing all the same petty jealousies and rivalries, shelterings and doubts.

Told in epic form, Dunn’s novel sees the Binewskis through the eyes of Oly – a sharp, caring and sensitive girl who happens to have a hump and a white skin pigmentation. It follows her hesitant relationship with her own daughter, Miranda – an almost normal girl who makes a living at a sort of strip club for freak-fanciers by showing off her curly, ten-inch tail.

Older brother Arty is the main contrabida in this tale of freak love: a keen-witted, overly-ambitious offspring with flippers for arms who engineers turmoil aplenty for the Binewski family.

Beneath the sibling rivalry and inter-generational dynamics, Dunn presents us with a familiar family structure: drawn to each other at times of crisis or outside threat, but also torn apart by these same forces which begin to make even loyal family members see their own as somehow "abnormal."

There’s also a running commentary on the true nature of cruelty and freakdom, as the Binewskis are beset by gun-wielding rednecks, rich "collectors" who pay top dollar for freak body parts, and a strange dance club where the usual participants – silicone-implanted strippers, fat ladies and in-between transsexuals – are upstaged by the appearance of Oly:

The fat lady standing on my coat is staring, with spittle across her cheek, and the fat man with his electric G-string pumping at his invisible crotch and laughing, and the shouts coming up, "Christ! It’s real!" The twisting of my hump feels good and the sweat of my bald head runs down into my bald eyes and stings with brightness... How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I’ve conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Walking a fine line between satire and horror, Katherine Dunn does a credible job of revealing just how abnormal the normal world can be, and how people are more alike than they may think beneath the skin. It’s an audacious performance worth all the assaults it may make on political correctness.

Look at this way: it only took the Osbournes – another family whose patriarch had a talent for biting the heads off of living mammals – one season to conquer the American viewing public. Before you knew it, they were as accepted as Ozzie and Harriet. So who’s to say Dunn’s Binewski clan won’t make it in Hollywood?