In a foreword to the novel, Molly Crabapple calls him a “manic pixie dream boy,” which is exactly right. A chance encounter brings her into contact with Sam, a college student who embodies all that Sally would like for herself: effortless style, a life of the mind, sexual charisma, sophisticated origins. In this second timeline she’s 20 years old, waiting tables in Portland and surviving on soda and cigarettes. In flashbacks we learn of the events that led to Sally’s retreat from the world. She keeps a tidy house, hangs out with her goldfish and passes the days in a depressive haze, self-medicating with ice cream and murder mysteries. Sally Gunnar is a reformed “bohemian slob” who lives on disability checks in self-imposed exile. It concerns the consciousness of a single marginal eccentric rather than the maelstrom of an entire family. If “Geek Love” was a misfit anthem, “Toad” is a misfit ballad - a quieter and more modest offering. In an editor’s note Huffman admits to a sense of “frustrated incredulity” that nobody beat her to the task. But it wasn’t until 2019 that an editor named Naomi Huffman, having been granted access to Dunn’s archive, read “Toad” and finally shepherded it to the finish line. You’d think that some canny publisher would have pounced on “Toad” following the smash success of “Geek Love,” which was a National Book Award finalist, if only as a money grab. The book was rejected.įor nearly half a century the manuscript sat in an archive at Lewis & Clark College among Dunn’s papers - part of a bequest arranged by the author before her death in 2016. Between Dunn’s early fiction and her runaway hit, she wrote “Toad” and submitted it to her publisher.

It landed with a cannonball splash where her two earlier novels, “Attic” and “Truck,” had produced ripples. In 1989 Katherine Dunn published “Geek Love,” a tender and hallucinatory yarn about a family of circus freaks. “Toad” is a curious specimen: a novel written in the 1970s that remained dormant until this year not because it was lost or unfinished or dreadful but because it was spurned.

Geek love book review