Book reviews for The Oregonian
Clown Girl
By Monika Drake Hawthorne Books Monika Drake’s first novel Clown Girl unravels with a surrealistic spin through Baloneytown pulling readers into the eye of the storm with experimental prose and lyrical humor. With hipster intelligence, Clown Girl wiggles out of spots as tight as the twists in balloon animals, gleaning wisdom from Buddhists, Hopis, an acupuncturist, a cop and, always, the Clown Code of Ethics. Searching for Plucky, her absconded rubber chicken-child; Rex, the Clown prince; and Chance, her little dog, she tries to perfect her Kafka-inspired act while systematically losing everything. Sniffles—Clown Girl’s real name, or is it Nita?—narrowly averts disasters such as burning down her house with flaming batons, being admitted to a psychiatric ward, and getting slapped with prostitution charges for hanging out with a clown fetishist, all while trying to maintain an illusive sense of balance. Feeling like a crone who has lost to life’s comedic brutality,she realizes, “The only value of wasted time is knowledge.” Drake tenderly crafts a human tale through the lens of an orphaned Baloneytown clown who’s just looking for herself. Drake keeps the plates spinning even when all hope for Nita seems lost. The vertiginous world of Clown Girl sweeps us into a literary hurricane, but then sets us down under blue skies. |
Whose World is This?
Lee Montgomery University of Iowa Press Lee Montgomery’s short-story collection, Whose World Is This?, alights on all the big issues—death, love, sex, drug addiction and friendship—with a clear, original voice. The stories are at once crushing and funny. Montgomery examines the interior lives of eight women and how they cope with heart-breaking moments yet still keep their sense of humor. “Don’t hate me because I have cancer,” Christopher tells his friend: Now that he’s on chemo, he can eat what he wants and not get fat. Misha, a newscaster who gets fired for crying on air, develops a condition she calls “Compassion Complexica Nervosa”: It manifests as rashes all over her body, in the shapes of countries where tragedies have occurred. “Misha had Haiti on her ankle, New Jersey under an eye, Laos migrating across her chest and on her belly, and Los Angeles behind her ear,” Montgomery writes. In the story “Arts and Crafts of American WASPS,” a young woman who lives in a world much different than her mother’s receives a huge package of things from her past. Among them, says Michelle, the narrator, are “kerchiefs and sweaters, woolen scarves and hats, books by Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, knitting and needlepoint bags full of my grandmother’s half-finished embroidery. . . . I am my mother and we are sleeping. I climb into her and float.” Lee Montgomery, who lives in Portland, has written this collection of touching stories with heart and grace. These are pieces that cut deeply but then administer the salve. Montgomery is also the author of The Things Between Us, a memoir of her childhood in the Boston area with a flamboyant mother who drinks gin each morning. She is the editorial director at Tin House Books and has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa. Whose World Is This? is a winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. |
At the Same Time; Essays and Speaches
Susan Sontag Picador Each of the essays in this posthumously published collection give short, readable and brilliant insights into who we are now as Americans. From three different discussions about Septemeber 11th, titled “9.11.01,” “A Few Weeks After,” and “One Year After,” to discussions on beauty, art, and literature, Sontag masterfully explores how we understand ourselves through everything from cultural relics to human torture. The essay titled “Photography: A Little Summa,” defines the ubiquitous impact of photography on our contemporary experience. “Photography – the supreme form of travel, of tourism – is the principal modern means for enlarging the world.” And then goes on in the following essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” to examine how photography impacts the way we perceive ourselves as the subjects of a government ensnared in the gruesome misdeeds of war. “The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures – less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated.” True to form, these gems from Sontag’s exquisite mind are both aesthetically magnificent and bracingly insightful. Sontag is known as a groundbreaking essayist, novelist and activist. She died in New York in December 2004. |