After her dirt-poor youth, Reed College must have been a revelation. Reed’s current tuition runs $60,620 a year, and even back then, it was flush with enough trust fund bohemians to earn it the unofficial motto “Communism. Atheism. Free Love.”* Toad’s Sam Rosen is one of these students. He is an aimless, impressionable, rapaciously curious manic pixie dream boy, and though they never sleep together, he becomes Sally’s great love. Quickly, she falls into his orbit. Dunn mines her experience to create the characters that people Sam and Sally’s world. They are pompous gits, who “flung etymological witticisms at … the staff, the faculty of college, Plato, Wittgenstein, Goethe, and various other defuncts with whom the whole group gave the distinct impression of having shared many a crust and chortle.” They gobble drugs, live in cat-shit-encrusted squalor, cook up foul batches of horsemeat. They idolize their teachers (Dunn may have modeled Sam’s beloved calligraphy instructor on her own Reed professor Lloyd Reynolds). They concoct fantasies of wise, exotic indigenous ways of being, to distance themselves from the prosaic suburbs where the parents who pay their tuitions live … and where their own futures more realistically point.

Fantasy is a hell of a drug, as the Binewskis knew, and the hangover is a motherfucker. At a party at Sam’s flophouse, Sally meets his dream girl, a swoony hippie chick named Carlotta. With her slender waist and thick black braids, Carlotta has all the beauty Sally lacks. She wears suede. She dances barefoot. “She was all high arches and soft pink heels. Her toes were rosy and clean. She bent a knee and swayed, lifted one foot at a right angle to the other, and gently, precisely, set her glowing toes down on a tight little roll of dog shit … She continued to sway her arms, although now she writhed and twisted as she scraped her toes through the grass.”

What does beauty get a girl? Dog shit, and the obligation not to notice.

Fascination with feminine beauty and ugliness unites Toad and Geek Love. Dunn herself was a lank-haired hottie in her youth, with a mouth made to caress sarcasm like a sweet. Yet in her work, the ugly girls get the best lines. Even more important, they live to say them. Geek Love’s lissome conjoined twins, Elly and Iphy, may be tattooed on the biceps of countless alternative models, but their fate in the novel is to be raped and impregnated at the behest of their sociopathic brother. Their beauty brings their destruction. Oly, their sister, might be a bald, hump-backed, albino dwarf, but she’s also the one telling the story. Sally Gunnar is a toad next to Carlotta’s hippie goddess. She conforms to no womanly ideals—traditional or countercultural. But she fucks and loves and mutilates (figuratively and literally) as often as she is mutilated. Carlotta and Sam crash into the consequences of their delusions. Sally sees so clearly it hurts.