Clown Girl by Monica Drake

Advanced reader's Copy
Soft cover
Near Fine but for a slight bump at the top of the spine
Hawthorne Books, 2006

When I was 19, I was living with some eccentric friends on Navajo Street in Denver. We had one of those televisions that had the thirteen channels and the second knob that got you a few more stations that broadcast Christian and Spanish-speaking shows. We also had four movies on VHS: The Exorcist, Eraserhead, Blade Runner, and Shakes the Clown.
The video that got the most playtime was Shakes the Clown. My house mates and I must have watched that movie over 50 times. It was a companion while washing dishes, and white noise while having company over. To this day, I can still nearly quote the entire movie from opening credits to close -- a talent gone unappreciated by my wife and friends.
When my wife saw an advanced readers copy of Monica Drake's Clown Girl, she knew she'd found me a gift I'd relish. here was a novel with collector's potential that concerned itself with the bizarre world of clowning. Here was a fictional world in which I could enshroud myself, like adorning a cherry-red wig, parachute pants and a Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat Vest.
To further my glee, Drake's novel has an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk, with whom she shared space at a writing workshop, long before the days of Fight Club. In the introduction, Palahniuk says that everyone waited, week after week, for Drake's sessional reading. According to the author of Rant, Drake was his rival, reading enticing tales of poverty and adventure, like how her characters would rifle through trash bins by the supermarket, searching for receipts because $200 worth of purchases got you a dozen eggs for 25 cents.
Drake's protagonist, Sniffles, is just such a character: a down-and-out party clown riding the line between selling-out and selling-art. Sniffles lives on the wrong side of the tracks with her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend and his body-building lover. She's waiting for her boyfriend Rex to come home from clown college and sweep her into a life of performance-art bliss, but has to scrape by until then, dealing with her paranoid house mates, fighting off advances from coulrophiles, and collecting urine for doctor's tests.
While all of these twists make for a really interesting main character (she is in full-clown makeup throughout the novel), most of the plot is obvious; every time the reader thinks something might happen, it does. For instance, Sniffles leaves her jug of urine in the refrigerator, unmarked. What happens next? That's right, someone drinks it. Sniffles doesn't mow the lawn for many months and it goes long and dry and then she wants to try juggling fire in the backyard. What happens? Yup, she burns up the lot. Even the main dilemma, where she's waiting for Rex but meets a cop with whom she takes a shining, is cute but typical in it's star-crossed-lovers approach.
Despite the obvious, Clown Girl had some really good themes. Like Palahniuk's Fight Club, Clown Girl is about the layers in which we hide ourselves. Where Tyler Durdon would say "You are not your furniture," (or in my case, my book collection), Drake's cop Jerrod would say, "You are not your clown uniform." Both Fight Club and Clown Girl are about identity and the societal layers in which we bury ourselves. Clown, cop, teacher, bookseller, librarian, guru, sexologist, or dog food taste-tester, we all dress and act appropriately, and when you're done saying, "You are not your big shoes/holstered gun/summer reading list/sexy hair bun/religious power-point/vibrating cock-ring/indigestion," you have to ask, "OK, so what the hell am I?" In Sniffles case, she's Nita, and Nita decides that beneath all her garb she's simply accountable for the choices she makes.
Hey, I think that's the message behind Shakes the Clown as well! Shakes is hiding behind his alcoholism and not being accountable for his messed-up life. As Owen Cheese says when picking up Shakes from jail, "That's the difference between a clown, and a really good clown."