If Geek Love is, as the French say, jolie laide (ugly-pretty), then Toad is just ugly. Yet that doesn’t make it any less mesmerizing ... When tragedy hits with a wallop at the end, you’ve been so mired in melancholy you almost don’t realize how huge the punch is. Toad is sad, funny and, most of all, deeply, unapologetically, ordinary ... Which is not to say that Toad is an ordinary book. It’s as weird as anything you’d expect from a writer this good at describing animal functions. Fluids and fats and flesh smack throughout ... Dunn never lets us get comfortable: Just when the lyrical sentences begin to soar, she yanks up the mellifluous prose and thuds down squat subject-verb-object clunkers ... She lays on vulgarities thick as butter ... Toad, with its single narrator speaking alone in her living room, lacks that kind of choral power. Yet Geek Love exists only because Dunn figured out how to feel through Toad. What Toad provides is a subtler embedding in an embodied life.
A curious specimen ... If Geek Love was a misfit anthem, Toad is a misfit ballad — a quieter and more modest offering ... One of Dunn’s running themes is the nature of disgust. As with her other novels, Toad brims with grime ... Reading Toad is like rummaging through the junk drawer of a fascinating person. It is chaotic, intimate and unruly. There’s not much of a structure or a plot. Still, it’s impossible not to share Naomi Huffman’s bewilderment at the book’s burial. Dunn’s style is unlike that of anyone living or dead: simultaneously practical and bonkers; lovely and nasty.
Toad’s modern sensibilities are revealed through its narrator. Dunn crafts an unsparing portrait of a woman who, while softened by isolation, was once more vicious and violent than pure victim: caring in one instance, cruelly dismissive the next. This is where Toad feels ahead of its time — and maybe ours as well ... With not much in her future worth anticipating, Sally wades through a hefty past. Her life unfolds in vivid but truncated flashbacks ... These loosely related vignettes are expounded upon with wry asides and little care for chronology ... Dunn’s writing is dynamic and propulsive, even if her subject matter — college-aged misfits dawdling about — has been thoroughly exhausted. Her didactic prose surpasses the spare, dispassionate style common among today’s novelists. One is never bored. Dunn is best inside the head of her characters, unleashing delightful screeds of detail ... While a compelling page-turner, the novel is unbalanced and hastily concluded. Had Dunn been given more time and an advance, Toad might’ve proven to be a very different book. Perhaps this dissatisfaction is to be expected from any posthumously published work resurrected from the archives, especially one that its writer had given up on.
