Due out February 2007, with an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk
IN THIS DARKLY COMIC NOVEL, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kafka and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a "corporate clown," trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution. Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars -- most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification, but is completely accessible to a general audience.
Clown Girl is published by Hawthorne Books.
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"Monica Drake’s Clown Girl is a high-voltage creation. She’s a passionate martyr to the art of clowning in a slapstick world that despises and exploits clowns. She’s hit a rough patch where the pratfalls hurt and the locals don’t get her jokes. She’s Groucho one hour, Chaplin the next, and a hospitalized Stooge or three by sunrise. She’s sad as Emmett Kelly, indignant as Holden Caulfield. Maybe she’s wrong. She’s certainly cranky. But Clown Girl is mesmerizing, drunk on the high wire, gorgeous and dangerous fun."
—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
"Clown Girl is an extreme novel—beyond metaphor, a hilarious book that asks the startling question: what does it mean to be serious about clowning? This intelligent narrative always keeps in mind the bleakness and desperation that initially caused a need for clowns, and that they, in their way, embody. Is there exaggeration in the book’s narrator, or in its world, or neither, or both? I found myself asking if I were myself a clown—and if not, why not? Caulrophiles and caulrophobes, prepare yourselves!"
—Peter Rock, author of The Unsettling
"Monica Drake’s Clown Girl is a bright shining bubble of a novel, dark, funny and deeply strange. The writing is brilliant—I would read this novel for the sentences alone—but it is Sniffles herself and her struggles to come to grips with life in Baloneytown that stay with me. The word “unique” is widely abused but I think, for once, it’s justified: this novel is not much like anything else, and all the better for it. A really exciting debut."
—Kevin Canty, author of Winslow in Love
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