--animation an unfinished project by the author, "No Flag" (2020) by Elvis Costello and the Imposters

Stop Saying Geek Love Anticipates Trump!

Dear Editor:

Stop saying Katharine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989) anticipates Trump! While I usually enjoy the insights of contributors to your publication, I find the literary reference in a recent political editorial, asserting that Trump is Trump because his nature was fused in a freak show of loveless, disfigured monsters, specious for basically two reasons: Dunn’s accomplishment is diminished as much by solving her work with a pat answer—making a sideshow President its perfect exemplar—as common experience is ignored by explaining any person’s completely blunt disregard for human life with a novelist’s metaphor for dysfunction.

The great novels, of which I include Geek Love, harmonize the forms of their elements so perfectly, they yield to many interpretations. Lazy critics explained Camus’ The Plague as having a one-to-one correspondence with surviving the murderous fascism of the Third Reich, in which case it wouldn’t also precisely describe the indifference to science of the first Trump administration during the literal plague of covid, would it? Kafka’s executor Max Brod earned The Trial a reputation for having anticipated the Nazi’s bureaucratic application of assembly line practices to exterminate Jews, which is the hollowing out of a more universal novel that just as well anticipates Trump’s DOGE bureaucracy and its first hundred days of indifferently impoverishing tens of thousand of families and canceling their medical benefits.

The great white whale of a metaphor in Geek Love is far too complicated to anticipate solely the freaks-making-freaks, dysfunctional Trump family. We know Trump’s exploitative and corrupt father never would have tolerated and bankrolled a son who was not a monster; similarly, on the Binewski’s midway, the status of family members depends on the marketable ugliness of their abnormality. Arturo the Flipper Boy smothers a potentially bigger attraction, the Lizard Girl, under a pillow. Both his albino, dwarf, hunchback sister and half of the Siamese twins are so afraid of him, they want to marry Arty just to get some kind of protection from his serial fratricide. Incest isn’t an issue: mating with anyone not family would be like having sex with a whole other species.

Of course, Trump fondled his own daughter on the national stage, and, like Arturo, he ruthlessly rules his circus by demanding absolute loyalty and extending none, throwing his CFO under the bus and into prison, inciting a mob to hang Pence, and making Musk his own version of Geek’s Bag Man, a souless mess of feeding and breathing tubes under a veil who only communicates in texts and unquestioningly obeys his boss’s psychopathic commands. The novel makes a form and Trump fits it generally, but isn’t it a stretch to call the alcoholic brother Trump cheated and abandoned to his infirmity the President’s version of the invertebrate stillborn siblings preserved in the Binewski’s trailor version of the Mutter Museum?

I fault the editor of your publication for diminishing the novel Geek Love by permitting a contriubutor to epitomize its central metaphor with an non-fictional man, or, in any case, the lowliest albino hunchbacked dwarf in a carnival of greater freaks. Dunn’s metaphor is multi-faceted, like the warped glass in a hall of mirrors producing any number of distorted monsters depending on your line of sight. If your writer maintains Geek Love anticipates a grossly deformed huckster spawned in a loveless petri dish, how does the ending of the novel fit into the dysfunctional family metaphor? Arturo as the oracular Aqua Man inspires his followers to amputate their limbs joint by joint. The image invokes more than a freak who delights in seeing others so deformed as himself.

How can one, pathetically amputated individual like Trump also represent the second half of Geek Love , which describes Arturo’s cult of achingly unsensational and self-despising hicks who blindly allow themselves to be swindled out of everything they own and their humanity, too?

You know what, think anything you want.

Firmly,
A reader