Truck by Katherine Dunn

Truck Reviews

• 
  Elizabeth

  Damnit.
  I thought this book was going to be super-good. I read Geek Love and I was all, "THIS BOOK IS SUPER GOOD!" so I went to Powell's and I got me a copy of Truck, which I paid six hard-earned dollars for.
  This book is not worth six dollars.
  This book is crap.
  I am sorry, Katherine Dunn, I'm sure you didn't mean to make it crap, and it was very brave of you to write almost the whole thing in one paragraph with no page breaks, and also to go jumping around all over the damn plot at random, and to set half of it in a homeless shelter, and everything, but shit. This book can suck it. If you liked this book, you should start reading better books, and that is that.
  My mom didn't like this book, either, and my mom is ALWAYS RIGHT about books.
  I gave this book two stars instead of one because I loved Geek Love so much that I feel like a jerk insulting Katherine Dunn with one star.
• 
  Steven Godin

  
  This is not your typical coming of age story. This goes places most other writers wouldn't dare go. It's quite perverse. But I like that. It doesn't faff about about when it comes to the human body. Just tells it like it is - smelly armpits, zits, wet knickers, piss & poop and all that. Like Geek Love, Dunn clearly had a thing for writing about outsiders. This early novel, which featured a small for her age 15-year-old tomboy rebel runaway may have given her the idea of creating the albino dwarf Oly in Geek Love many years later. Truck has a lot of profanity running through it, and stream of consciousness ramblings that can at times just go on for way too long. It felt like Dunn was still learning on the job. But in Dutch, there is this battle going on that I really did find quite profound, as on the one hand we have her cheeky boyish traits on the outside, but inside there is a young woman awakening who is curious and complex and yearning for a settled future as somebody's wife: away from the road; away from a possible life of criminality. Truck is certainly a strange and difficult novel, and one I would only recommend to a selected few.
• 
  Marc

  When Katherine Dunn died in 2016, I rushed out (meaning, I clicked on a new tab), and searched for and ordered used copies of her other novels (other, being other than
  Geek Love, which is one of my favorite books). Basically, I forced myself to finish this one. It did get a little better as I went on, but I ultimately did not much care for it. There are some great descriptions and a very distinct teenage main character who flees home simply to escape life's mundaneness (as far as I could tell). An outcast among outcasts, "Dutch," has a kind of naive wisdom. Unfortunately, I found it more grating than enlightening.
  
  Note to self: Just because you adore one book by a writer, it's okay not to read everything they've ever written. No seriously, it is. Be less OCD about this sort of thing.
• 
  Arnstein

  70's antinovel that attempts to explain the self-conseptual chaos of early puberty by repeating that very chaos in writing.
  
  The novel is a style of narrative where the components of the story – characters, sequences of events, location in time and space, and so on – are pieced together in a manner which is easy for the human mind to follow. In a sense it mimics our mindset, stringing together the elements in a way that is largely linear and thus allows the reader to recreate the story much as we would reconstruct one from our memory. The antinovel obviously deviates from this, making for a more challenging read yet one which allows for a more malleable presentation, in turn making it possible to explore the topic at hand with more unique perspectives. These are of course not satisfying definitions of either concept, but they are sufficient as an introduction to the deviancies of Truck.
  
  A brief but decent description of these deviancies are given by Dutch, the protagonist, herself: "[I] close my eyes and look at what comes onto the insides of the eyelids. An owl's face." (p. 119) The reader is placed inside that piece of her mind which one could refer to as 'the eye of the consciousness.' This is not our eyes, ears or other sensory organ; what reaches our consciousness isn't raw light in millions of individual rays whose path has bounced them off of areas of atomic density (or 'objects,' if you prefer), but a finished puzzle which our subconscious minds has made from all the individual pieces. Neither is it our memory, which must obviously exist subconsciously since we do not rummage through our mental archives when we realize we've lost a password as much as pray that we will be able to coerce our memory to deliver it to us. The eye of the consciousness is where memory and perception meets, to be observed by our conscious selves. Put this stream of Dutch's observed thoughts into book form then you'll end up with Truck.
  
  But this stream of consciousness is notoriously unreliable due to the fact that we're just getting the images of it all, and it is hard to separate what belongs to the outside reality from what belongs to internal imagination just by watching them fleet past. To Dutch it is all a part of her world of thoughts, to her it makes sense. To us readers it is more difficult as we will have to sort out this distinction between fact and fiction for ourselves. We will have to deal with an unreliable timeline where memories might confuse themselves into the current events. And then there will of course be the spur-of-the-moment topic changes – e.g. the 'owl's face' – which is a part the normal workings of every mind, yet which does disturb the reader's sense of coherence when attempting to make sense of Dutch's tale. Also, the reader should be warned that since we're placed so intimately to Dutch's person we don't get any filters and parts of the narrative can be quite explicit; of course, this just makes the psychological aspect of the tale feel more genuine.
  
  Yet, these obstacles do serve a purpose, chaotic as they may be. Jean Gillis, who's known as 'Dutch' by everyone but her mother, is fifteen and is herself in a somewhat chaotic state. Growing up, going from the state of being a minor to one of being... some kind of unknown amongst that general category 'adulthood,' is not going smoothly for her. She still has a child's body, yet her mindset is steadily maturing, creating an ever greater gap between the physique and the psyche. Taking up the role of a tom boy has so far been her way of dealing with it – at least no one questions her lack of womanhood if they think she's a boy – but this clashes with her infatuation with Heydorf. Heydorf is one of those guys who try to impress others with his carefree demeanour and know-it-all wits, but who is still far too young to actually have either. Dutch realizes this, but follows her heart anyways, and when Heydorf go to Los Angeles to find a way to get rich then she follows him there as well, trucking in his heels. (As a partial yet relevant digression, the nickname Dutch was given to people of German or Netherlands descent, or to someone considered inferior or cheap (e.g. a Dutch treat). Consider the latter etymology, then consider Heydorf's haughty treatment of her, using his last name to indicate a finer breeding while letting Dutch trail after him. Here the names alone actually hint at their roles and how they relate to each other.)
  
  One could label Truck an experimental narrative and experiments, by their nature, can fail. If indeed Dunn intended Truck to be a complete transcript of what is a deeply mental journey, then she fortunately succeeded. The depth of character is almost unparalleled, though Dunn herself put up a worthy challenger when she wrote Olympia Binewski's surreal tale. Truck is, however, not all that similar to Geek Love. They hold an equally high literary quality, and, arguably there are some similarities in Olympia and Dutch's personalities, but beyond that the books are quite different and seems best recommended to readers of different tastes. Geek Love best suits those who enjoy the fantastical and epic, while Truck is far more down to earth with its mundane realism. As for The Attic, Dunn's first book, it seems generally considered to be of the same kind as this one, but this reviewer has yet had the pleasure to verify this.
• 
  Kate C

  This uniquely written book takes a little time to get into as the format is very unusual. The protagonist’s actions stream into her thoughts and into her dreams without notice, sometimes requiring re-reading of sections for clarity. Dunn is raw and raunchy and painfully real in her writing, and Dutch is relatable in a way that may be uncomfortable in admitting to having similar thoughts and feelings. By the end I was so wrapped up in her I went back and read the final pages again and again. This book is not for everyone, but I found it to be dead on.
• 
  Twyla

  Really easy to read with the whole lack of structure train of thought thing. Did she or didn't she, I've read it twice and still don't know. DOn't like the way they crunched that in at the end, might have been better without it.
• 
  Lucia

  When all the love in the world isn't what you need because you're already invisible! Dunn encapsulates the pain and the desire for solitude in that gross wonderful realism that I'm always craving. What else can I say, I love Dutch and I love this book.
• 
  David

  The commitment to the voice in this one is impressive, but I'm not sure it is entirely worth the work. The character is interesting, as is her world, but it is a great deal of work to read. I have no problem doing that if I feel it worthwhile, but I question it a little bit here. It seems perhaps the commitment to putting something more literary together might have outweighed the book itself. Just my reaction, but that's all I've got. It's still got some good stuff inside.
• 
  Amy

  made me dream about eating a whole chocolate cake
• 
  Michelle

  Painfully beautiful story of coming of age. That statement doesn't do the book justice, but I don't want to say too much. By the same author as Geek Love and she does not dissapoint.
• 
  Kristi Marshae

  Raw, visceral, ugly, strange, self-absorbed, much like teenage angst itself.
• 
  Bookeater504

  I think I kinda hated it until the last chapter and it all came together. But SHE wrote it so I have no regrets.
• 
  peter

  Technically, incredibly impressive, but not the most enjoyable literary experience. Dunn is interesting because Geek Love is possibly one of the best pieces of fiction ever created and then her other work doesn’t really come close to it… maybe that’s normal? I don’t know.
• 
  Cheryl Klein

  A gritty stream-of-consciousness narrative of a teenage runaway, this novel reminded me more of Lynda Barry's Cruddy or Cynthia Kadohata's Floating World than Dunn's own Geek Love (which I loved). The narrator, Dutch, is one of those tomboy straight girls who seemed to occupy all the books of my youth (where are the femmey queer girls?! But I'm getting off track here). She has kind parents but feels suffocated by her small Oregon town in a way she doesn't quite understand, so she plots to truck down to Los Angeles with her weirdo friend Heydorf. The strangest and most interesting thing about this novel is how the first half flashes back and forth (without even a paragraph break to warn you) between a dark, murky present and snapshots of Dutch's home life. It then eases into a more linear story, but ends in a spot that seems to negate the possibility of the first part of the book. I wasn't sure if this was a highly experimental meditation on the power of fantasy and the many possible futures that await people, or if I just missed something.
• 
  Serena J

  I had a very hard time with the writing style of this book. It follows in a very scattered way, a teenage runaway, an odd child. I couldn't tell if the writer was trying to show us that the scattered teenager had so many thoughts through her mind, that you were SUPPOSED to feel that scattered feeling, but it was just irritating.
  
  I had a hard time connecting with the characters. I know Katherine Dunn is a good writer, and I loved her style in Geek Love, but this was not like that. The writing was disjointed. I felt bad for the main character ever so slightly, but didn't connect with any of the characters in the story. There wasn't enough development of the characters, and honestly, I had a hard time even understanding what was happening until about 1/2 way through the book. I will say, I enjoyed the second 1/2 MUCH more than the first half. But, I won't read it again.
• 
  Molly Gove

  i read this book a long time ago. it was written 9 or 12 years before geek love and you wouldn't guess they were both written by katherine dunn.
  
  it's a sort of hard-scrabble tom-boy coming of age story. i think is shares themes with cruddy, housekeeping and foxfire, but definitely has it's own specific insights. i especially remember being really touched by the theme of food and what the trashy kid was eating all the time (coffee, twinkies, general crap) and then, through a series of plot twists, she ends up on the run and camping out in a forest by a lake and is foraging and fishing to stay alive and how you see the fog lift from her thought process.
  
  i love this book.
• 
  C

  I adored this. I think this should replace 'The Catcher in the Rye' as the quintessential teen angst novel. I love all of Dunn's books. The thing is the writers I love most usually don't have many books out. The only thing with Truck is I couldn't tell when this takes place. And also the ending confused me! It wasn't concrete enough for me.
  
  Dear Katherine Dunn,
  Write more novels!!
  
  This reminded me of Lord of the Flies -- except instead of an island, Dutch and Heydorf were trying to run away from society within society.
• 
  Howard

  This was really a "good read," maybe a failed experiment in stream of consciousness weirdness, in that the plot is occasionally incoherent (not so the language), maybe a successful experiment that needs further attention. I liked the book enough to want to read another by the same author right away. I have a personal policy against doing that because I'm a fanatic for moderation, but I'm looking forward to reading "Attic" of similar vintage (1969) later this summer.
• 
  Matt

  I really wanted to like this book. Reading it felt like a chore. The book is more or less one long never ending paragraph. Half the time I had no Idea what was going on. I fell asleep reading it a few times. It made me laugh though. It's not without its funny moments. Don't read it if you're expecting to get that geek love feeling back. It won't happen.
• 
  Andrew Farr

  This was a lot of stream of consciousness. The first bit of this book seems to flash back and forth in time and is very confusing. There are also a few paragraphs that go on for between 15-20 pages long, which become difficult to digest.
  
  I read this because I love Geek Love, but it was a VERY different voice. It makes me want to read her last book.
• 
  Andrea

  I really loved Geek Love and was so excited about this book, but it didn't hold my interest. Sentence and paragraph structure were too long making it difficult to engage. Sadly I admit I couldn't finish this book- maybe I will try again when I have more patience.
• 
  Mundivagant

  LA plays seaside, tarp-covered,
  canned spaghetti home to an
  androgenous runaway teen from
  Oregoneforgood and the troubled
  object of her slowly surfacing
  pubescent affections, i.e. Dunn's
  little pondered second
• 
  Jamie

  Kinda weird but I don't remember the story ever amounting to much.