Product Description

With daring realism and stunning imagination, the author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn, takes us on a journey into the mind of a feisty, adventurous adolescent named Jean "Dutch" Gillis. Dutch goes "trucking" from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles on a quest in search of herself, which, like the river trek of Deliverance, is filled with chilling discoveries and sudden violence.

With boyish-looking Dutch is her friend Heydorf, a shadowy character who has his own secrets to hide. With her, too, is the confusion and volatile feelings of youth, when sex is a mystery waiting to be understood...and death seems remote until it brushes close with a breath-stopping suddenness, Truck, perhaps better than any other fictional account about a runaway, is a brilliantly convincing portrait of the archetypal teen rebel, and both the excitement and the terrible betrayals in the world she explores.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377649 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

This is no Geek Love
I am a completionist. Whenever I read a good book by a writer, I seek out their other works and read them as well. "Geek Love" is one of the best books I've read in a while. It is richly plotted, well developed, and it contains some of the most unique and bizarre yet believable characters in any work of literature I have ever read. Needless to say, I finished it and immediately looked up everything else by this author.

"Truck," although published by Warner Books, has the look, feel, and smell of a "print on demand" book. I have never seen it in a store, and the "brand new" copy they sent me when I ordered it had no cover price on it, nor does Amazon offer it at a discount. I suspect that Warner Books publishes this book as a print on demand book to any person who looks it up online and wants to read it because they liked "Geek Love." I think this is a good thing for both the author and the publisher.

I wish all books could remain in a "print on demand" format once their original press run goes out of print. This would be a good way for publishers and authors to continue making money on a book that may be forgotten by most.

Unfortunately, "Truck" does not even begin to reach the heights Dunn achieved in "Geek Love." The narrative style is nowhere to be found, nor is the character development. Dunn herself, in her afterword to "Geek Love," admitted that she wrote her first two novels and then took ten years off to "learn how to write." In that time she refined her craft and composed "Geek Love." Indeed, she was telling the truth.

"Truck" is a convoluted rambling narrative that goes on and on in paragraphs that last for many pages and that include dialogue which, although in quotations, is still included in the middle of paragraphs. It is hard to read, and offers little reward upon completion. By the time I finished this 200 page book, I no longer cared what happened to the characters. The book ends very loosely as well, adding to my frustration. There are some good observations in this book, some of the writing is of good quality, but please do not buy this hoping to find something as moving and as important as "Geek Love." You will be let down.

I can only hope that Dunn will someday come out of hibernation with a new novel that captures the depth and quality of "Geek Love." Please do not come to this book hoping to find the same.

if you can find it....
after reading "geek love", i spent several years searching for dunn's earlier, out-of-print novels. until today: stumbled upon 'truck" in a used store! been reading all afternoon: daring fiction, fascinating characters (of course), and i am left wondering why ms dunn is not more widely recognized...her writing is even more experimental and adventurous here than in geek love (far as language and structure are concerned)...few writers can pull off a forty page paragraph, compelling all the way through.

See how far Katherine Dunn came to write Geek Love
As a huge fan of Geek Love, I read both Truck and Attic, Dunn's earlier works. It's clear from reading Truck, the account of a boyish runaway girl, that Dunn came a long way in learning how to structure a narrative. The main character in Truck seems loosely based on Dunn's own childhood. The characters are compellingly physical-- they do things that real people do, like check their pits for smell, that people in books rarely do. They are polymorphously perverse. The plot is not terribly engaging, but you either sympathize with the characters or are disgusted by them; Dunn doesn't leave much room for simple apathy.