Customer Reviews

Clown Girl: A Novel

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Monica Drake is a decent writer. She plays with the language the way clowns play with pratfalls and cream-filled pastries. There's no doubting that among the pages of "Clown Girl" is hiding an author with enough charm and wit to pen a book brimming with both humor and heart.

This, however, is not that book.

The story follows young Nita (you can call her Sniffles) who is struggling to make ends meet. Working the circuit in her home land of Baloneytown, Nita twists balloons into vague religious shapes, tries to find her lost rubber chicken and her drug-addicted dog, and deals with the absence of her beloved, a man named Rex Galore (he's away at Clown College, paid for by guess who?). The only thing is, Nita's got a heart problem (uh, ahem, an actual, physical heart problem), and so she's working fewer hours, earning less money, and her ex-boyfriend/landlord is threatening to kick her out of house and home. Add to the mix a cinnamon-scented copper with a stalkerish streak, and you've got more problems than a clown should have to deal with.

Drake shows us Nita's struggles through her daisy-shaped sunglasses, so those difficulties are all tinted with a painted smirk and lots of punny rejoinders. It's a silly-serious mood that works quite well at first, but which begins to grate more and more as the novel devolves into soap opera theatrics. By the final pages, what is meant to be funny is as eye-rolling as any knock-knock joke, and what is meant to be serious is just plain laughable.

Nita's/Sniffle's coworkers try to get her to do more high paying gigs (let's call it Clown Cuddling for Cash), to pander to the creepy-grins of the coulrophilic (read: Clown fettishists), but she (mostly) turns away from that path and chooses the road of commitment and dedication. This means she does a lot (A LOT) of pining for Rex, and she spends a good deal of time working on a mime-ish interpretation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. These are lofty goals for a clown; good for her.

Unfortunately, for a woman with (sometimes shifting) standards and such ambitious intellectual pursuits, Nita is infuriatingly dumb. You can quite easily guess the conclusion of this book after reading twenty pages of it, as long as you're not too creative about it. And in the meantime, you must watch as Nita pushes back against obstacle after obstacle, most of which she has erected herself. Her heart, dog, chicken, relationship, and money problems all come across as the products of someone who is either too dumb to think for themselves, or simply can't be bothered to do anything but be sad and beleaguered. There's nothing quite as irritating as a central character who manufactures her own problems and then wonders for pages and pages, "What's to be done?"

To be fair, Ms. Drake is the real manufacturer here, and her literary intentions are clear: she wants you to sympathize with and care for Nita. Unfortunately, it is not a character's hardships that make them worthy of love or compassion, it is their hearts and souls. Nita may very well have one of those, but she's so busy mugging, jesting, and hiding under face paint (even to the last pages), that she is less a girl than she is a clown.

That would actually be a good premise for a short story, a small sidewalk show, a five-minute social treatise on what we are and what we make ourselves into, but that is not what Ms. Drake is going for here. At least, not solely. The love story. The heart problems. The prostitution, money, stealing, running, and constant fumbles and falls. Well-written, well-painted, and cleverly phrased it may be, this three-ring circus still has two rings too many.

Monica Drake is a good writer and very clever but that cleverness becomes a bit cloying. Certain topics - for instance, "Pluckie," the rubber chicken - lose their funniness and become more like water torture by the end of the novel. But clowns are known for overkill and Clown Girl is rife with it.

The book is well written and there are genuinely funny parts. If the reader has been searching for material that nominally deals with clown prostitution and clowns getting pregnant, then maybe this is the book you've been searching for. But for out and out weirdness, nothing touches Geek Love.

There are a number of places that are laugh out loud funny in this offbeat first novel. I, too, found this book because I loved Geek Love so much. Indeed, it does not stand up to that book for depth of plot or character, but it is an entertaining read. As others have said, this feels like it started life as a short story and probably would work best in that format, or perhaps a novella, but I did enjoy it nonetheless. Some of the characters and story elements are a bit cliche, but it's a breath of fresh air from all the bestseller stuff that takes itself so seriously. If you like quirky and oddball, this one's for you.

I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next. Speaking of which, where's Katharine Dunn with a successor to Geek Love?

Chuck has nothing to worry about here. While Drake has a great voice and a vivid imagination this book just ran out of steam. It probably would have worked better as a short story. I found Nita's self-imposed hardships to be quite grating after about 100 pages and there were still 200 pages of the same to go. It all got a bit repetitious and obvious after awhile. I also didn't find the book funny. I didn't laugh once. I have to add that I am in no way the sharpest tool in the shed but even I saw the ending coming a mile away.

I did not expect to like this book; the opening chapter is surprisingly alienating. This is due to the fact that there is so little for a reader to hang onto that resembles anything remotely familiar, and I actually put the book down and read another one after reading that first chapter.

But then I decided to give the book another try, and I'm so glad that I did. The images and emotions evoked merely by the language used is reason enough to read the book. There is always a sense that there is more going on beneath the words on the page than what first appears. The narration of Nita (or Clown Girl) is witty and usually fun to read, and it is this first-person narration that finally drew me in, and once I began caring about what happened to Nita, I was hooked, and willing to accept that this novel is a complete caricature, a representation. It is one of the best-written, original, and satisfying books I have read in a long time, and I recommend it, knowing that the content will not appeal to everyone.

I have one small concern with the way one of the major themes of the novel is presented. Various internal monologues and conversations throughout the book indicate that Nita is coming to terms with the fact that she can make her own choices, that life does not or should not just happen to her.

This idea is presented attractively, if somewhat simplistically. The novel does such a good job of demonstrating (sometimes heavy-handedly) the fallacy of going too far to the opposite extreme-- that some people blame their circumstances and social situations for everything they personally do that is immoral or wrong-- that it ends up ringing somehow slightly false by not acknowledging the role that social life does play in shaping our choices and free will, especially considering the ending. Although, I found the ending and Nita's epiphany extremely empowering, realistically, it is doubtful that it would have occurred if she had not met police officer Jerrod in the opening chapter-- who not only suggested quite strongly several times that she could make different choices, but held himself out as a strong anchor of social support when she was finally ready to do so.

It is difficult to have an option in your range of choices that you are either completely unaware of or do not deem possible. Yet, because the book does not either directly or indirectly acknowledge this, it veers dangerously close to a mentality that, in part, blames victims for their own victimization. Nita is both an empowered actor, and an unfortunate victim, but she is not really given authentic credit for being either.

Despite this intellectual quibble, the book receives my high praise and should be widely read by those who are looking for something a little different.

Recently I read somewhere that great novels aren't written anymore - certainly it's true that great novels aren't often published anymore. but Clown Girl stands as a shiny exception. Through spare dialogue, brutal imagery and divine comedy Drake pulls the reader into a vivid world that is mesmerizing, unkind, post-modern and somehow redeeming.

If I wrote, "Drake compromises no character to explore complex issues of identity, role and class stereotyping within the gen X slacker world" I would give only a partial impression of her novel. Within this matrix are witty observations and hyperbolic plot lines that additionally provide a surreal, captivating, and yet wholly believable narrative.

The clown who makes us laugh, makes us cry, the clown who laughs to cover her own tears are all here in a tale filled with tricks--in every sense of that word. In her crisp, poetic, slight-of- hand, Zen-like style she evokes a landscape where the images are drawn with only a few strokes of her deft ink brush. Rarely have I read anything so fresh, different, and curious.

As the person said, who lent Clown Girl to me insisting I would like it, "It is really good." It is not, of course "good" or "really good", it is brilliant and gives me hope that a new generation of talent is out there, pushing us forward, finding yet a different and fascinating way to tell a story.

Journalist Charlie LeDuff wrote that "The job of the clown is to never reveal this one simple truth: life is horrible." Well, Monica Drake breaks this rule, along with many others of the "Clown Code of Ethics", in just about every chapter of Clown Girl.

You'll read in the Palahniuk introduction that this novel creates its own reality, and it definitely does. Drake pulls you into the hilariously depressing world of Baloneytown (adjacent to ForSalesville) and tells the story of a girl trapped in poverty, illness, and complete delusion. Nita, (aka Sniffles, aka Clown Girl) walks the streets in full clown attire as she desperately searches for solutions. She usually only self-destructs even more. She repeatedly ends up in hospitals, police stations, and bars as everything in her life goes wrong one step at a time.
The story starts out with Nita having practically nothing of emotional or material value. She lost her baby to a miscarriage and her parents to emancipation. She loses the rest, including her dog, Chance, and her rubber chicken, Plucky, within the first few chapters. As things get desperate, she compromises her sacred art of clowning by "clown-whoring" herself out to corporate clients and worse. As far as the romantic side of things goes, Nita can't get her mind off Rex Galore, the love of her life who took off for Clown College San Francisco and never calls back. She finds herself avoiding, yet still trying to sneak peaks of a blonde cop who seems to come to her rescue every time she's in trouble. All this while she's still trying to develop her clown acts, Nita gets distracted and despondent. She's a girl whose life is defined by abandonment, so she has that fake tough, self-reliant attitude to cover up her desperate need for help. In classic clown fashion, she shields herself with jokes and acts.

Drake uses tons of clown details and the book is radically bizarre in subject matter. Who knew there was so much to the life of clowns? You may find it hard to relate at first, but no doubt this book represents universal human struggles as well as any great modern novel. Baloneytown seems all too similar to a lot of American cities, and Nita is a character that seems all too similar to many American artists. Drake deserves lots of credit for taking something many people are unfamiliar with and making it absolutely real. The fact that it's so unconventional makes it that much sweeter when you're immersed in the reality of Clown Girl.

A couple years ago I discovered a masterpiece of modern literature: a novel called "Geek Love" by Katherine Dunne. That novel was unique in its central premise, and rife with fascinating characters, truly bizarre events, and compelling, wonderful language. Basically, it had everything that this novel, "Clown Girl," so sorely lacks. Of course it's rare for a novel to have the same visceral impact that that aforementioned book has, and I wouldn't have even thought to bring it up if I hadn't noticed so many fellow reviewers drawing comparisons between the two.

Whereas "Geek Love" is a gripping family saga that masterfully juggles two seperate plot threads and makes the reader equally interested in both, "Clown Girl" is a fairly simple, humdrum, expanded short story. Sniffles, the protagonist, is a sad clown who is lonely and feels alienated and unappreciated and suffers from ostracism on account of her trade. She is in love with Rex, another clown, though the relationship is hardly where she would like it to be. Her clown colleagues don't share her passion for "art," and instead prefer to do corporate clown gigs for fetishists, where the big bucks apparently are. She's a fan of Kafka, and because of her sensitive temperament, she yearns and yearns and yearns. Oh, and she suffers from "heart" problems -- physically, of course.

The novel is so extraordinarily cliched and predictable that I kept reading mainly just to see how much of what I saw coming two-thirds of the way through would turn out the way I expected. (There were no surprises.) As I read page after insipid page, I kept wondering: Is it that the writer is from Portland that people feel the need to compare this novel to the pitch-perfect "Geek Love"? Surely it's not a comaparison predicated on originality. If the protagonist had been a ballet dancer rather than a clown (or something like that) and the rest of the story stayed the same, this would read like a trite, flaccid, made-for-TV movie.

And what a shame, too. I was really excited about it.

After having seen this recommended to me multiple times because of my interest in Chuck Palahniuk's books, I finally found it in the library; shame it's not on Kindle, but I got around to it eventually. After reading the description of the book and noting that Palahniuk wrote the introduction, I was excited to start another mind-altering trip, this time in clown shoes. Perhaps I was expecting a little too much, but the book was definitely worth the read and I sped through the first half of it. I laughed out loud several times during that first half, though the humor started to get repetitive and the soap opera of the main character's unrequited love grated on me a bit.

That said, I enjoyed the somewhat normal circumstances and good intentions progressing to ridiculous situations. When Monica Drake comes out with another book I will definitely read it and would recommend this book.

I read Clown Girl in about two days flat, forgoing sleep and sunshine just to finish the novel. It's dark, twisted, and beautiful with an unwavering voice and a lot of heart. Monica Drake really shines in her debut novel about a clown trying to be an artist in a world that only seems to pay those who sell out to the corporate world. Baloneytown is often a scary place full of drugs, prostitution, and those trying to make a buck at the expense of others. Being true to the art in such a place is certainly a test for Sniffles. And watching her try is a heartbreaking and enjoyable ride to take.

I would recommend this book to anyone.