What is in a name, if nothing but power

Some novelists can never really ever live up to their own personal high point. There are few I can think of who, across the whole of their career, have produced constantly excellent work. Sometimes it is all downhill from a stunning debut, sometimes you can see the promise and they hit their stride decades after their first fumbling steps. A consequence of being human, and the consequence of humans reading your work. Everything is context, a time and a place, and the time and a place where I read something that means the world to me could be plain and mediocre to you, in your time and your place.

It probably helps if you keep the output small (cf my beloved Marcel, though I am not sure you could call that a piffling output), or don't pretend to be anything more than fodder for the masses. Which serves a purpose in and of itself. I mean, if the masses wanted worthy and literary, the Harry Potter series would never have sold. I mean, if the masses wanted meaning and well-written, the Millennium trilogy never would have sold.

Contrast with the few novels of John Kennedy Toole (I recommend 'A Confederacy of Dunces', this isn't a review of that) or indeed Katherine Dunn, whose latest novel I have been waiting for since...a decade? More? I also heartily recommend 'Geek Love', a wrenching novel...which leads me to change my pace here.

This post was originally going to be a short retrospective of the work of Paul Auster, culminating in his latest works. As he has released two books in quick, by his standards, succession. It no longer is. I am going to ponder on Ms Dunn's novel, which I first read in 1990, at a guess. Maybe a year or two earlier, and re-read again this year. It isn't High Literature, but it is certainly startling and shocking. For some context, I read it more-or-less at the same time as Brett Easton Ellis' debut (not his third novel, which was shocking in a different, slapstick way) was released, which was also startling and shocking. I must re-read that to see what the impact is.

'Geek Love' is still shocking, decades later. Not quite so to me, but certainly to a few others to whom I lent it. I guess I forgot. Why so? The content? Sure, but that isn't it. Is it shocking to be told of giving your pregnant wife mercury, to make sure the child is deformed? Is it shocking to spy on your mother, or your daughter, with an eye on murder? Is it shocking to prostitute yourself (and your Siamese twin sister, who isn't always in to it), to trample the dreams of others for your own benefit, to cheat, lie and use?

It is, but that is the staple of trashy novels since the beginning of trashy novels, which is pretty much the same length of time the novel has been around. The shocking thing is to be reminded of how we define the normality of the world in our own terms. There is no quarter given here to the misfits, the dwarves, the albinos, the freaks. It is their voice you hear, through the narration by one of them. And by finishing that last sentence as I did, you get the otherness I mean. How can I, who could quite rightly be seen as others as The Man (oh how that makes me laugh), hope to understand the world apart? And that is what makes this a great novel.

There is no pitying tone. There is no woe-is-us. There is only celebration of themselves. Similar to Ellis' third novel, the end is a spiralling dreamscape, though more drenched in reality than his. The events happen, contrary to the way you imagine, but wholly in the way the narrator expects it. There is no cop out for our feelings, this is their world, seen in their way.

The story of their lives, twined with plans of world domination, cultish personalities, trying to keep the Old Way of Life alive, anecdotes and love. For it is a story of the triumph of love, but their love, Geek Love. The writing flows, the story accelerates, it is, after all, a novel. Not hard, not difficult, but hard, and difficult. Funny, touching, shocking, but only as we aren't them. Our funny, our touching, our shocking lie in realising that it is orthogonal to theirs, and the glimpse into their world, their thinking, is funny, touching and shocking.

There is the analogy to Auster (which caused me to change tack) of his use of names, and Dunn's use of family relations, though I would need longer to explain that, and I have been tangential enough in this non-review.

Apologies for not reviewing what I started out, but that is the thing with words, once released, you don't, and can't, control them. Maybe at some point I will review the works of Auster.

As ever, the photographs are my own, nothing to do with the review and/or book (as sometimes my reviews have nothing to do with the book), and the original links are: Raptor dance, Singe and Back to back