Toad

September 26, 2022
Dunn (1945–2016) leaves readers a throwback to the 1960s counterculture scene in this pungent precursor to her 1989 National Book Award finalist Geek Love. Sally Gunnar, middle-aged and living alone with her goldfish, reminisces about her student days spent on the periphery of the cool kid scene at a small liberal arts college in the northwest. She relives moments steeped in magic mushroom dust and unwashed bodies with her friend Sam, who rarely goes to class and never follows the rules. She looks with disgust, not on his filthy student digs or the horsemeat he serves, but on his circle of friends as they party and pose. She is filled with rage at their inauthenticity and the way they seem to themselves not exist unless someone is looking—except Sam. And then Carlotta appears. She and Sam move to a farm, then to Montana, and eventually tragedy strikes. Sally goes through a string of lovers, slits her wrists, and breaks the law with a violent act, all in an attempt at some kind of self-realization. The story has moments of hilarity, its raw prose fresh with unpretty evocations of stale rooms and bad poetry. It amounts to a sobering look at the reality of what one’s glory days actually entailed, shot through with the unmistakable undertow of pain and self-loathing.

Starred review from September 1, 2022
A posthumously published novel from the author of Geek Love (1989). Dunn's magnum opus--the tale of a family of carnival freaks--is a true cult classic, but the year it was published, it was also a finalist for the thoroughly mainstream National Book Award. Geek Love has never been out of print, and it continues to be a solid backlist performer. Few authors with one bestseller get an obituary in the New York Times, but Dunn achieved that distinction in 2016. She's an author who wrote a book about outsiders who has been embraced by insiders. This newly published novel suggests that this counterculture hero had a complicated relationship with the counterculture of her youth. The narrator is Sally Gunnar, a woman who has chosen to live alone except for the goldfish she keeps in a jar on her kitchen table, the toad that lives in her yard, and the handful of visitors she invites into her house. When her sister-in-law asks, "Remember Sam and Carlotta? Whatever became of them?" Sally drifts back to Portland in the 1960s. A student at a small liberal arts school--Dunn attended Reed--Sam is, in Sally's words, a "spunky little character with an intellectual air." He's also a jackass. In his desire to outgrow his middle-class New York upbringing, Sam tries on a variety of names and ethnicities. He falls in love with Carlotta, an ethereal hippy who seems to find him as profound as he finds himself. Together with a narcissistic psychology student named Rennel, these misfits form something close to a family. Sally is part of this unit--she even starts taking classes at their fancy college--but she never loses an outsider's perspective. She recognizes that her friends are ridiculous, and she loves them anyway. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, it takes a dark turn. Sam and Carlotta's belief that they are equipped to live off the land leads to tragedy. Sally's self-deprecation--which at first seems like her viewing herself with the same irony with which she regards her friends--turns out to be a mask for clinical depression. But Sally endures to find a fragile peace, carefully tended day by day. A gentle, funny, heartbreaking indictment of the na�ve excesses of the 1960s and the testament of a woman who survived them.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022
Dunn, author of the counterculture classic Geek Love, died in 2016. The posthumously published Toad tells the offbeat story of Sally Gunnar and her bohemian friends Sam, "a dirty little guy;" Carlotta, his girlfriend and later wife whose "toes were rosy and clean;" and Rennel, who is in love with his body. ("Bohemian" here means living in squalor, neither bathing nor changing clothes.) When readers first meet Sally, who tells the story in the first person, she is 20, a part-time student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The story then flashes forward 15 years to find Sally in Boston. When her boyfriend leaves her, she has a breakdown and returns to Portland. From this point, the narrative moves backward and forward, sometimes confusingly, with readers seeing Sally as young as a teen and as old as her mid-thirties. Sometimes angry, sometimes flippant, sometimes self-hating, sometimes lonely ("loneliness is hard and cold"), Sally is a great character, as is Sam, who seems to have logorrhea; their memorable story has flashes of brilliance and is compulsively readable, a feast for fans of the offbeat and a delight for those discovering Dunn's work for the first time. Now, about her unpublished short stories . . .

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