Via John Marshall at the Seattle Post Intelligencer

Monica Drake was a corporate clown, although not the usual sort who sits in staff meetings and nods at every utterance of the boss. She was a corporate clown complete with face paint and costume and oversize shoes who was hired by various companies for meetings, social events and grand openings.

 

Many of the Portland resident’s memories of her six months at the lucrative corporate clown trade are as fuzzy as a fright wig, but she still recalls her last gig. It was at the grand opening of a fast-food outlet where too much greasy food mixed with greasepaint prompted Drake to quit, the final curtain for her juggling days and rubber-chicken nights.

 

Or so she thought. Little did Drake know that, years later, the temp job she stumbled into from college studies in dance and theater would be the centerpiece for her much-awaited debut novel.

 

“Clown Girl” (Hawthorne Books, 297 pages, $15.95) is a devilishly quirky look at a downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of Baloneytown. It is a worthy fictional successor to another Rose   City female writer’s highly original novel with not-dissimilar material -- Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love,” an instant idiosyncratic classic about freaks in a traveling carnival that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989.

“Clown Girl” arrives with considerable river-town firepower. It boasts not only a blurb from Dunn, who describes Drake’s novel as “gorgeous and dangerous fun,” but also has an introduction by Portland ’s King of Quirk, Chuck Palahniuk, creator of “Fight Club” and other tilted-kilter best-sellers.

 

Palahniuk was a fellow member of the “dangerous writers” group under Tom Spanbauer, and his introduction describes Drake as his “archenemy” (“ ‘rival’ would be a nicer word, but let’s be honest”). As Palahniuk stresses, “No matter what you’d bring to read, Monica would write something better, funnier, more surprising, and sexy.”

 

So Palahniuk’s high-octane verdict on “Clown Girl” (“more than a great book ... its own reality”) bears the heft of a once-jealous fellow scribbler, which is one reason why Drake has gotten boffo press in Portland, including the cover of Willamette Week newspaper. Hawthorne Books, a six-year-old Portland publisher, has already run through “Clown Girl’s” first printing of 6,000 copies and has ordered 5,000 more, spreading plenty of clown smiles around the publisher’s office.

 

The center of all this attention has the wary gaze of a deer suddenly caught in the headlights. All the requirements of being a new author -- doing bookstore readings, answering interview questions, posing for photographs -- are a world away from the years expended in bringing her novel to print.

 

“It took a decade,” the 41-year-old Drake relates. “Isn’t that sad?”

 

Read the rest of the article at the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer

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