Clown Girl

A brilliant and hilarious book. I know that not everyone shares my sense of humor, but I disagree strongly with most of these negative reviews. Especially those that say Clown Girl just limps around town feeling sorry for herself. This is a girl with talent and ambition. She's constantly trying to improve her situation; she just doesn't always make the right choices.

I've never read anything like Clown Girl. I loved the character and I loved the book.

Drake spins a marvelous tale but the real reason I think I loved this book so much is not only that Nita speaks to me in an almost eerie way, but also because Drake inverts the traditional chick-lit story by stating outright what it is that makes these clumsy, clueless, grandiose, insecure women appealing. She makes it clear from the very title what Nita is. She’s a clown. No mincing words. Nita is a clown and Drake shows how hard it is not to be a clown when hiding behind makeup, clothes, images and pie-in-the-sky ideas is all one has ever known. I’m a clown, though less clownish (I hope) as I get older but if you began as a clown, bumbling your way through life, you will find much to like about Nita and her slapstick life. In show more Nita, using the raucous background of clowns and her inversion of the modern chick-lit novel, Drake creates a character who tells a story we are familiar with but have not wholly heard before. Read my entire review here: http://ireadeverything.com/clown-girl-by-monica-drake/ show less

Sniffles (real name, Nita) is a clown that has fallen on hard times in Baloneytown. Her boyfriend, Rex Galore is off for an interview at Clown College, leaving her alone to find her way. While he is gone, she dreams of becoming a famous art performance clown, but is instead stuck working fairs tying balloon animals and biblical images, trying to make an honest dollar. She works constantly at an art piece she hopes to premiere someday: A silent version of “The Metamorphosis”. Her world is divided into very set social scenes: The clowns, the cops, the rich folk who rent the clowns, and the rest of the trailer trash.

While performing one afternoon, Nita has a miscarriage. Without insurance, she is back on the street quickly until she show more suffers a panic attack and lands herself back in the hospital at the hand of Jerrod, a too kind cop. The doctors tell her she has a heart condition, and send her home to do a 24 hour urine collection to see if they can find anything out. On the way home, she sees Jerrod and because he is a cop, she runs. Cops always mean trouble for clowns.

When it is found out the Nita and Jerrod have been spending time together, Nita is thrown out of her home. Her landlord forbids any cop to be seen around their home, and rightly so – he’s a drug dealer and a burnout. Jerrod shows up in her life more and more, always there to bail her out when things get hard. Nita begins to wonder why he is being so kind to her, and whether or not he’s just another guy looking for a clown date.

In this strange world filled with coulrophobics and coulrophiles, Nita is stuck trying to find her way as a performer. Should she sink to the bottom and become an S& M clown? Should she stick to her path and create her own one-of-a-kind act? The lines between clowning and prostitution get more blurred, day after day as she waits for Rex’s return.

Nita pines for Rex to come home, over glorifying their love and their relationship until one afternoon, he just appears. Confused over her relationship with Jerrod, Nita quickly tries to solve her problems by throwing all of herself back to Rex. She is met at first with love and passion, but Rex quickly tells Nita that he has this wonderful idea for his audition at Clown College: A silent version of “The Metamorphosis”. Betrayed and baffled, Nita’s world which seemed to be falling into place becomes a mess one more time. Once more, she must start over and reevaluate her clowning life.

Opinion: Monica Drake took her time with this novel, it being her first, and it shows. The connections between characters as only slightly predictable, but are always well explained. She shows an interesting reflection of how we can take all of these cultures and sub cultures and blur the lines to make them what we want. The clowns are outcasts that the rich need for entertainment. The rich use them for everything, yet still fear them and their kind.

Near the end, Nita removes her clown make up, and hardly even recognizes who she has become. There is constant talk between Jerrod and Nita about how they are in costume (her, a clown, him, a cop) all the time, putting on an act that is more important than any act they know. Everything they have is a prop, there to illicit a response, to secure their future (him, a gun, her, a rubber chicken). Who are the underneath the image they display?

Drake has a very honest voicing through her novel, making her main character very believable. You feel for Sniffles, and want the best for her. You cringe when things go wrong for her and you root for her when things start going right. Jerrod comes across as a bashful, yet down-to-earth type. Every time he is brought back to Sniffles, I was excited to see what would happen. The glorification of Rex Galore really showed how easy it is to get lost within your love for someone and how human it is to feel entirely devoted to something you’ve really only idealized. The heartbreak and betrayal are real and the feeling this book evokes make it worth adding to your library.

Rating: On a scale of 1-5 stars, this book is a 4.5. It took me awhile to get passed the veil of Baloneytown and realize that this book is set in modern times, but in a world full of literary metaphor. Once I got into the sync of things and accepted a little suspense of disbelief, this book really got enjoyable. I loved the format of it: titled chapters. It made each section feel like its own episode in Nita’s topsy-turvy life. Drake did a great job really making her unbelievable world believable, which made me take yet another fun look at the world we live in. It’s easy to see how Chuck Palahniuk and she are such good friends. show less

Clown Girl is not a goofy funny novel, but it isn't supposed to be, regardless of what preconceived notions you get from the title and the picture of the rubber chicken (Plucky!) on the cover. What Clown Girl is is a great first novel from a very talented writer. I can't wait to read more of what Monica Drake has to offer. Thank you, Chuck Palahniuk, for recommending this gem.

Nita has decided she is a clown. Not a commercial sell out, but a real artist, and she's modeling herself after her absent boyfriend, Rex Galore. The problem with Nita's aspirations is that she isn't a very good clown, artistically or otherwise. She refuses to give up her dream, however, even to the detriment of her own well-being. This is the label she's applied show more to herself. And that's what this book is really about--the labels we subscribe to, the perceptions we have of who we are and who we want to be. It is about how others see us, our motivations for our actions and the implications of those actions. This novel has depth, and that depth makes a simple story about an unfortunate clown girl an excellent read. show less

Monica Drake writes about a city very much like any city – except that in her city, clowns really matter.

Nita – or Sniffles, to use her clown name – is Clown Girl, the heroine of the piece. She works soul-killing corporate gigs to fund her boyfriend’s clown college try-outs, and tries to focus on her [clown] art, find her missing dog, not get evicted, and shake an overly-friendly policeman.

Clown Girl is quirkily entertaining. Drake is clever and she has created a self-contained world where her story makes sense. She is also very funny. She is funny with words and with the way she juxtaposes her clown-world with the real world. There is a dark edge to her humor, though, and it is touch and go whether the book will end in smiles show more or tears.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

I've talked here before concerning the surprising things I'm learning about books these days, now that I've been a daily critic myself for about nine months now, and especially two factors that more heavily influence what we think of a book than a lot of us realize -- of where we in particular are in our own lives when we read the book (in terms of age, experience, career level, etc), and also how much we've heard about a book before we've read it ourselves. And really, if you want a perfect example of what I'm talking about, let's take show more today's book under discussion, Monica Drake's highly popular 2006 debut novel Clown Girl, a book that for a couple of years now has been getting talked about in glowing terms from just a whole pile of people I know and admire; I mean, c'mon, the introduction was written by Chuck Freaking Palahniuk, who by the way happened to be a member of the academic writing workshop where this novel first took shape.

And then I read it. Hmm. And I realized that it's not so much that this novel is truly unique or original that it's been getting so much attention, but that it uses a highly unique and inventive trick for telling an otherwise pretty plain story -- that is, Drake tells the story of a struggling young artist in the corporate world through the metaphor of professional clowns, a gimmick I can literally picture a tableful of dour grad students with tasteful beards and drab GAP sweaters delighting over when first coming across at some summer workshop in some quaint upper-class small town in the Hudson River Valley. Because admittedly, the gimmick is a cute one, one that can be stretched further than you ever thought a "clown in the corporate world" one could; how our unstable hero Nita got into the whole industry in the first place for its performance-art qualities, because of the grand tradition of French mimes and Cirque du Soleil and all the rest, but now finds herself working corporate parties and other "red-nose events" in order to pay the bills. And how her fellow-clown boyfriend is off in northern California as we speak, interviewing for "clown college" (i.e. grad school at UC Berkeley); and how she is getting pressured by her lesbian co-workers to get into the erotic/stripper side of the whole clown scene for extra bucks; and how when she misplaces her rubber chicken, she puts up flyers all over the neighborhood as if it were a lost dog. Yeah, cute, like I said, a trick just good enough to hold together an especially strong slam poem or New Yorker short story.

Ah, but here's the problem, that the gimmick wears thin in a 300-page novel; and when it does, you're left with a pretty typical grad-school storyline at its core, one that could be substituted with the plotline of a thousand other stories by grad students without anyone ever being the wiser. Because when all is said and done, Clown Girl is ultimately about unpleasant white slackers in their twenties, deliberately living in sh-tty neighborhoods not because they have to but because they are rejecting their white-bread middle-class backgrounds, pursuing lives as conceptual artists and small-level drug dealers and full-time academes as a way of pushing off real life as long as possible. And this gets into the complication I was talking about -- because I used to like such novels, see, back when I was in my early/mid-twenties myself and living more of that kind of lifestyle myself, and can understand why so many people I respect have been going nuts over this book recently. It's not a bad book, that's the point I really want to hammer home today; it's just that I've read this story way too many times in my life now, a story I find less compelling with each year I get older, a story that ultimately cannot be saved by a literary gimmick no matter how cute that gimmick is.

And this gets into the second complication I mentioned before -- that since I had heard so many great things about this book going into it, I'm tempted to be more disappointed than normal, and to give the novel a lower score than it deserves. And the truth is that it doesn't deserve a low score -- it's a well-written book, after all, a tight and plain-spoken story that you can get through in a single day if you're dedicated. It's just that you need to be careful with this book, to not expect too much out of it, to accept that it's a product of an academic environment and therefore has all the trappings of grad-school literature. Do this and the book is sure to entertain; expect more like I did, and you're bound to be disappointed.

Out of 10: 7.5 show less

Well done, Monica Drake!

While this book turned out to be absolutely nothing like what I expected (I mean, there's a rubber chicken on the cover!), it was lovable just the same. The whole thing is just delightfully strange - from the neurotic main character, to the concept of clowning as an art form...just fantastic.