She tends to her plants and four goldfish. She entertains the same four visitors every month. Sally has maintained this hermetic lifestyle for an unspecified number of years (whether 10 or 35, it’s uncertain), living off meager government disability checks. Her physical traits, once the source of her ire, are unimportant: “Am I getting fat? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, the goldfish won’t complain.” Now, alone in middle age, she is finally content. She admits to being “a great follower of persons,” seeking approval and affection in those who rarely returned it. In youth, Sally was undesirable, unseemly, and suicidal. Her ambling narration is caustic and occasionally sentimental, oscillating between scenes from her scrappy college years and her tumultuous adult life. Recluse offers Sally dignity and distance from an ugly, troubled past. Published after Dunn’s 2016 death, Toad considers the freedoms and limitations of a woman’s indefinite isolation. Forsaking beauty requires a total rejection of people, of all society. They “do not exist without someone looking at them.” If beauty is social currency, quantified by the gaze of others, its value would collapse without an audience. “If there was no audience, we rehearsed.” Young people especially. “There was no cigarette lit, no itch scratched without a full awareness of the audience,” Sally Gunnar observes to herself.
The narrator of Toad, Katherine Dunn’s fourth novel, offers a perceptive remark on this tendency. Even alone, most people felt beholden to some imagined scrutiny. Online forums dedicated to “glow up” transformations proliferated.
Interest in plastic surgery and cosmetic services surged. WHAT IS THE VALUE of beauty in recluse? Curiously, during the pandemic, many people seized on this period of compulsory isolation to beautify themselves.
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