Toad by Katherine Dunn
Sally Gunnar is the god of her own domain, and she likes it that way — or she has lived that way long enough to convince herself thus. In the book’s present, she is a middle aged woman with a dwindling amount of acquaintances and a toad in her back yard. In the past, the college student version of herself living in 1960s Portland, Sally, by all accounts, is a toad, hopping around glumly and compulsively, making mordant one-liners under her breath, and observing her peers from her vantage point of being kept at an arm’s length. Her friend Sam is a hairy, annoying guy living with five roommates who makes a habit of changing his name on a whim and incorporating Wittgenstein into casual conversation. He of course has a hot girlfriend, Carlotta, who in my mind looks like a cross between Cher and Shelley Duvall. Carlotta decides she wants to have Sam’s baby; the couple moves from the putrid city commune to a rancid country farmhouse. Their life is narrated by the specter of Sally, the toad, not egging them on but watching them fail. Between then and the present, Sally fails and fails herself, through a series of humiliating reproaches and incidents, and ultimately decides she is more at home in the world when removed from it.
What the story lacks in plot it makes up for in observation: the strong, assured voice of a character who only really has herself, through a combination of fear, design, and circumstance.
… I have discovered for the first time that there are people who actually dislike me. It has only recently come to my attention that there are a number of people who, given as full a knowledge of me as it's possible to get on a casual basis, find me insufferable, disgusting, irritating - even actively boring. It's a shocking realization, nearly incomprehensible. Even people I myself have liked or admired, and have made overtures toward. If it were envy or jealousy, I could understand completely. Those are my own prejudices, often enough. But the clues are obvious […] I can interpret a lifted eyebrow and a twisted mouth, or someone drifting away from my vicinity. Unappreciative dolts I am used to. […]
But that the shrewd, perceptive, and humorous might know me and turn away is something to think about. It is something to mull over in the bath and knead into the bread. So far my thinking on the subject allows two possibilities: Some of these people, by sheer form and inclination, are incapable of liking me. But some of these people must judge me by my own standards and find me wanting. Perhaps they think that laughing at the motivation for your own actions does not exculpate you from either motive or deed. I wonder sometimes myself.
