Review of Clown Girl by Monica Drake
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Clown Girl: A Novel
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Girl Clown
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The Clown And the Show Girl (Eakins Press Pocket Albums)
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Girl Clown
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Hardly Har Har
I guess Drake was making up her own genre--clown noir--or maybe I'm just not familiar with it. If she was, then she could look to Katherine Dunn as the foremother of the genre, but a mother whose teat she needs to keep suckling...as in, she's not there yet.
It was neither subtle nor flagrantly funny. I felt like it needed to be one or the other, or a juggling act of both. I actually think it would be quite good as a movie. Then everything she tells us would be shown instead.
Basic synopsis: Clown Girl stays at home in Baloneytown while boyfriend Rex Galore moves to the big city. At home, she finds everything she was looking for in herself and her friendly neighborhood cop.
Her thesis: Corporate America is keeping us down. Oh, wait, we're keeping ourselves down. Stop blaming society!
If Drake had fully explored the idea of a kind of clown noir, I think it could have been something. But instead she tries to make her novel more than chick-lit-in-a-clown-costume by adding allegorical superstructures unsuccessfully.
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Comments
Hi Monica,
Thanks for responding. I agree with you about the importance of responding to reviews - otherwise we end up with a bunch of one-sided monologues instead of a conversation.
I know you review books yourself for The Oregonian, so you've seen it on both sides. I'll definitely have to pick up a copy of the Indiana Quarterly Review. I also liked "http://salem-news.com/articles/january122008/clown"> this review of your book at Salem News.
Again, thanks so much for responding. Better two views than one!
Monica Drake says:
18 months ago
Hey there! Thank you for taking the time to comment on my novel! But ugh! That teat sucking metaphor--man, you've lost me.
(I'm so pleased and grateful that Katherine Dunn blurbed my novel. Originally she said no, she doesn't blurb books as a policy, then she read it and changed her mind. The first edition doesn't have her praise on the back, though subsequent editions do.) I'm a little turned off, also, by the "chick-lit" atagorization. Seems like the mark of a broad, generalized reading, a short cut.
Fortunately, other readers have been both more involved and more thoughtful in analysis. My all-time favorite is a beautiful and well considered review in the Indiana Review Quarterly. It's so gratifying to put work out and find that there are readers who connect with both the comedy and the deeper content. Those are the readers I cherish.
I was just talking with another writer about the choice of ignoring or responding to these kind of reviews, and I guess I'm interested in responding, working toward a conversation rather than just a world full of "reader reviews."
Good luck with everything. I'll look for your writing in the future--are you writing something, or only reviews?
Thanks again for taking the time to read and think about Clown Girl.