Monica DrakeBesprekingen

288

I guess I find it refreshing to read a book that depicts pregnancy from so many different points of view, most of them miserable. I'd been told it was funny, though, and I can't really agree with that. The characters have stayed with me -- they are vivid, but ultimately unappealing. I don't read a lot of literary fiction any more for just this reason, so perhaps if you're into that kind of thing, this will likely blow your skirt up.

Two girls in in a fractured family learn to live and raise themselves as their hometown is eaten up around them. Powerful and real working class fiction with characters you won't forget for a long time as you laugh and cringe along with them.

"ll happy families are alike unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way." The book in not a collection of short stories, at least for me, it is a novel. each chapter is told by one of the sisters at different points in their life, in each story Monica brings in colorful, interesting and wounded characters. all of them fight their demons to love life and for the most part they are able to do so. Monica writes with great compassion and power. if you live in Portland read this book! read it even if you are not from Portland

The introducton was written by Chuck Palahniuk and I love him. So I went into this thinking, that if he loves the book then I will too. I did not love this book. It is about Sniffles aka Nita a girl clown who is in love with Rex Galore also a clown. Rex is away waiting for his audition into clown college. We follow Sniffles through a lot of missing Rex, fainting in the heat and "corporate" clown jobs.

Some parts funny, other parts horribly painful. Scenes from four women's lives in Portland, each a variation on having babies or not.

3.5

I was fortunate enough to get this book at an Adult Bedtime Stories event. I say fortunate because it was not something that I would have normally picked up. But I am so glad I was introduced to it. The wonderful Monica Drake has a dry sense of humor that I find just hysterical, and this book shows it off well. But at the same time, it tears at your heart strings and is such a good portrayal of what it is like to be human. It takes a brilliant writer to create a book that's very much just about the characters and their lives. The particular human experience addressed in this particular story is procreation. Through the lives of several different women, we see the idea/experience of having children from entirely different perspectives. One is desperate to conceive, one has a child and is wondering if motherhood is all it's cracked up to be, another is dealing with (gasp!) a teenager, and another has opted for the furry kind of children instead. All the women are memorable and have stuck with me. Drake is brilliant and it shows.

[CEDUTO]. Non è una "commedia vertiginosa" (salvo alcune scene dove ci si potrebbe vedere bene Peter Sellers dei primi tempi) e non è una "rutilante sequenza di battute" (non me ne viene in mente neppure una). E' un piu' che dignitoso testo, scritto da una lontana parente letteraria di Palahniuk, che si presta alla introduzione [spero] per amicizia e non perchè crede fino in fondo a quello che afferma.
Senz'altro, la scrittura è attenta e creativa; la signora D. conosce il mestiere, ma scrive forse piu' da "mestierante" che non da narratrice.
Per il resto, con tutti i libri che si pubblicano ogni anno, ci sta che entrando in libreria si tira su a caso anche questo. Andarselo a cercare è già più grave...

a wonderful book about Portland, about growing up when you're in your 30s and not growing up. in places it is funny, in other places sad. I want to know what happens to these character in 10 years.

Tried reading this twice and couldn't finish it, rubbish and I'm confused why Pahalniuk gave such a great introduction for her. He talked her up and she fell way short.

The Stud Book is a brilliantly written and totally engrossing exploration of breeding, mostly among a group of female friends in Portland, interspersed with fascinating details about animal husbandry.

Dark and absurdist in tone, the things that happen to these characters feel like they could really happen. I love it when an author really goes there. Even scenes I found off-putting (like Georgie's husband at the bar while she struggles at home with a newborn) paid off in the end.

Generally, I'm weary of books that bounce between narratives about multiple characters. When you like some characters more than others, it's frustrating to leave them behind for a less interesting storyline. In this book, I got wrapped up in all the characters, eager to see what would happen next.

As a rule, I like novels to have more resolution to their resolution than The Stud Book does. However, I will forgive Drake for this open-endedness because the book was so thought-provoking, I don't mind filling in the blanks with what I think will happen next.

So smartly written. I look forward to reading more from Drake.

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.

Evidently Chickentown
by John Cooper Clarke

The bloody cops are bloody keen
to bloody keep it bloody clean
the bloody chief's a bloody swine
who bloody draws a bloody line
at bloody fun and bloody games
the bloody kids he bloody blames
are nowehere to be bloody found
anywhere in chicken town
the bloody scene is bloody sad
the bloody news is bloody bad
the bloody weed is bloody turf
the bloody speed is bloody surf
the bloody folks are bloody daft
don't make me bloody laugh
it bloody hurts to look around
everywhere in chicken town
the bloody train is bloody late
you bloody wait you bloody wait
you're bloody lost and bloody found
stuck in fucking chicken town
the bloody view is bloody vile
for bloody miles and bloody miles
the bloody babies bloody cry
the bloody flowers bloody die
the bloody food is bloody muck
the bloody drains are bloody fucked
the colour scheme is bloody brown
everywhere in chicken town
the bloody pubs are bloody dull
the bloody clubs are bloody full
of bloody girls and bloody guys
with bloody murder in their eyes
a bloody bloke is bloody stabbed
waiting for a bloody cab
you bloody stay at bloody home
the bloody neighbors bloody moan
keep the bloody racket down
this is bloody chicken town
the bloody pies are bloody old
the bloody chips are bloody cold
the bloody beer is bloody flat
the bloody flats have bloody rats
the bloody clocks are bloody wrong
the bloody days are bloody long
it bloody gets you bloody down
evidently chicken town
the bloody train is bloody late
you bloody wait you bloody wait
you're bloody lost and bloody found
stuck in fucking chicken town.
Clown Girl is, for the most part, a 300-page exposition of this.

By Monica Drake
Hogarth, Random House Group, 318 pgs
978-0-307-95552-4
Rating: 4

Sarah, Georgie, Nyla and Dulcet, all women approaching middle age in Portland, Oregon, have been friends since high school. The Stud Book follows a short interval in their lives filled with upheaval caused by the brain-stem-drive to reproduce, good and bad, and how each can lead to the other.

Sarah watches baby animals at the zoo all day, the species confined there and the ones that come to see them. She is an expert on animal husbandry and the stud books used by the world's zoos to manage the populations; a little more of this, a little less of that. Her husband Ben grew up downwind of a chemical plant that has left his hometown barren, and maybe him, too. After the fourth miscarriage, desperation to reproduce (she is frustrated with the zoo's snow leopards who are becoming extinct and don't seem to know it), the stud books give her an idea. Sarah starts eyeballing men all over town for promising genetic material. Cue Heart.

Georgie is a lit PhD with a "French feminist tramp stamp" (tribute to Simone de Beauvoir), a newborn and a husband named Humble. He should be more so. Georgie has a favorite paradigm - the "rhetorical triangle": author, audience and text. When their daughter Bella is born, for Georgie "The meaning of the world shifted from the life of the mind to the bloody, seeping, heartbeat center. . . . Any mind-body split was blasted out of the water once her own body was nurturing a new mind." Humble's reaction to his wife's new role is bourbon and a morbid interest in the myriad depictions of dead girls and women on TV. See practically any television show, ever.

Nyla is the embodiment of Portland's hippie past, embroiled in a tug-of-war with it's hipster present. She is a widow with two daughters, Celestial and Arena (I told you she was a hippie), trying to build a future with her new zero-waste retail store. Celestial is off at Brown but Arena is in high school and having a hard time finding her place. Nyla is so busy saving the world for the next generation; writing checks she can't afford to a dozen different charities (liberal guilt); opening her new eco-perfection store in a gentrifying neighborhood (which she feels guilty about); and a new pregnancy of her own (ditto); that she fails to notice when Arena, Nyla's next generation, begins slipping.

Dulcet (no, that is not her real name) is unmarried and childless by choice. She teaches sex-ed to adolescents while wearing an anatomically-correct latex bodysuit. Dulcet is prone to a variety of mind-altering substances, experimental art installations and equally experimental sexual relationships. She is free of all claims on her body, mind and time, and she likes it that way. Her only apparent long-term relationships and loyalty belong to her small circle of friends. Is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose? Cue Janis.

Ah, women and babies, fraught with feuding emotion. I love babies, their heads always smell so good. That fragrance is hard-wired into the female of the species, a direct hot line, red phone to the ovaries. (And YES, I know that not EVERY female primate has a strong maternal instinct, so please no mail.) That's why pills are important, otherwise we'd all have 20 kids like that clan in Arkansas. With the ability to plan pregnancies comes the responsibility to consider more than just personal and private concerns: population, environment, quality of life, mutual responsibilities owed, allocation of resources, the Social Contract, both personal and political. The personal is political. Especially in Portland.

The climax of The Stud Book, the cataclysmic event that brings all of these parties eyeball-to-eyeball with the consequences of the choices they've made (and the choices they've avoided making), is a shock. I did not expect this and I am an experienced hand at this plot business. The characters are fully-drawn women, which is always a treat. Ms. Drake makes you care about what happens to these women, sympathetic and empathetic. Ben is a complete character, too, but Humble doesn't get much development. His arc ends (begins?) with a sort-of revelation, a conversion, if you will, just as sudden as the aforementioned shocking event. I can't tell you any more than this. Portland itself is a character in this book; the constant struggle between tradition, development, capital and responsible sustainability. This is not a book where all of the story lines come together in a neat bow at the end. But it does end with fresh possibilities. Who can ask for more than that?

Monica Drake is the author of Clown Girl, winner of an Eric Hoffer Award and an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award). Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals, and she is a regular contributor to the Oregonian, the Portland Mercury, and the Stranger (Seattle). Ms. Drake has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently on the faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

The Stud Book will be available April 9. You can pre-order from this blog with Amazon or IndieBound.

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.

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 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/

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 or tears.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.½

rubber chicken love story
not the same as, but if you like Cruddy, Vernon God Little

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 neighbor 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.

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 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.

Somehow, this one just missed with me. I felt for Sniffles in some ways, but something about her actions, and the pace thereof, just didn't bring her through as a real person to me. It was hard to follow her seemingly random antics and poor choices through the whole book. I found the other main characters unlikable and difficult to identify with. I imagine I would have enjoyed the residents of Clown Girl more in a short story or novella.

I think that the Palahniuk name-drop on the cover was actually a poor choice--I was expecting something different when I saw that name, but this book never got anywhere near that level.

(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 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

Haunting, sparse, gripping, interesting and hilarious. Who would've expected clown sex to be portrayed in such a non-comedic and touching way. The image of their clown paint transferring and mixing on their bodies stuck with me, heh.

Monica Drake creates a world where clowns just are part of the scenery. Her main character is extremely well drawn and her struggle to find her muse, live her life and relate to others is superb. A strong debut book. I'll absolutely pick up whatever Drake does next.