TOAD!
siblings or dating?
When I bring up Katherine Dunn, which I’ve begun doing with an almost religious fervor, more people than not nod knowingly, a sparky little gleam in their eye. Geek Love, they say. So great.
And I’m sure it is. I hope to read it one day. But I must tell you about Katherine Dunn’s first novel, Toad, written sometime in the seventies and only just published three years ago.
First of all, something about the physical book itself has a mystical, magnetic pull. I live in New York which involves much sitting around and waiting: on the subway, in the lobby of a movie theater, at a bar. Almost every time I took this book out in public, someone would approach me to either tell me about Katherine Dunn or ask me about the book. I can’t figure out why. I’ve read books with equally compelling titles and covers but there was something about this one. If you’re wanting to meet new people, it’s as simple as bringing Toad with you. Here’s one of several examples. At a bar in my neighborhood where I often hang out, I read a few pages of Toad while waiting for my boyfriend to meet me after work. He arrived, I put Toad down, we ordered drinks, and I forgot about the book. A little while later my boyfriend got up to go to the bathroom and a man with gray hair and a stylishly distressed sweater approached with two queries: 1. Was I liking Toad, because he and his girlfriend saw me reading it and were so intrigued that they’d looked it up on their phones and had already ordered it on Amazon and 2. Was the person sitting with me at the bar my boyfriend or my brother? The man couldn’t tell and was curious. (Despite the fact that my boyfriend and I had smooched when he’d arrived…? I wanted to say, but didn’t.) It was an incident straight out of an Ellen Gilchrist novel.
Second, this novel opens with a woman ruminating on her fish which she keeps in an old gallon pickle jug on her red kitchen table. Here’s the first line of the book:
I, of course, gasped when I read this. Did I actually, audibly gasp? I think so, I do. I read the first two lines of this novel and felt an uncanny creeping sensation come over me, like someone was standing right behind me and breathing down my neck, despite the fact that I was home alone, lying in bed. Was I one of Katherine Dunn’s goldfish, reincarnated into the body of a human woman? Did my mother somehow stumble upon this unpublished novel and read it to me while I was floating like a fish in the womb? I cannot think of a reasonable explanation for the strange coincidence which is thus: my first novel also revolves around a fish who lives in a washed-out pickle jar. To you, perfect reader, this will likely sound at best like a mild, maybe sort of wacky coincidence, and at worst like I’m being a complete narcissist. Hold my hands and look me in the eyes: you have to understand how much of my life I’ve spent thinking about a fish in a pickle jar. Years of my life. Years of my singular, precious life have been devoted to this: fish, pickle jar. Not just any container either—a pickle jar. To read another fictional fish in a fictional former container of pickles….it was like the open palm of my brain was reaching out to graze the open palm of Katherine Dunn’s brain.
She’d hate that. Maybe? I don’t know. Katherine Dunn was so unbelievably rock and roll and her novel, Toad, is as funny and visceral and nasty as I imagine she might’ve been. Toad is concerned with grime and human bodies and the disgusting things we do when we’re alone. It is not a shy novel. It’s an I’ll-grind-your-nose-into-what’s-true novel. Unfortunately, I really have nothing in common with Katherine Dunn other than the fact that she is probably the only other human being in the world who knows what it’s like to spend a not insignificant amount of time trying to accurately depict a red fish in a container originally intended for pickled cucumbers. She is way, way cooler than I could ever even dream of being. Bartender-at-a-Hell’s-Angel-hangout in Portland cool. Fighting off a mugging by kicking the thief in the shins at age sixty-four cool. If I truly believe that her book has a weird magnetic force field, which I think I do, I’d guess that magic is Katherine Dunn’s singular and gutsy quintessence lingering around somehow.
What I am really trying to say is: don’t you want to read Toad?
SUNDRIES
If you’re excited about Frankenstein’s Bride, might I suggest Louisa Hall’s novel Reproduction? It’s about a novelist researching Mary Shelley as she is trying to become a mother herself. One of the most gutting and truly original novels I’ve read in recent memory.
I read somewhere that a recent study showed people who eat ice cream regularly lead longer lives. I refuse to look into this further and cannot imagine this is actually true, but I do think there’s something to this, a discipline of pleasure and delight. I’ve been practicing this by eating Trader Joe’s chocolate coconut milk ice cream with a tiny bit of salted almond butter before bed.
I’ve started watching Friday Night Lights for the first time and and am having the time of my life! Most people who like television and/or Texas and/or football have probably watched this show by now, but what you may not know about yet is the website “Television without Pity,” I cannot recommend their episode recaps enough—they are novelistic. I love everything about this show, even the deranged Season Two that ends without…ending?
You can find other things I’ve written here. You can order my first novel here so that I may continue having a job doing something I like (this is 65% a joke). Thank you so much for reading!
At least you and your boyfriend were mistaken as siblings. I was once asked if my brother, who is 13 years younger, was my son!