The rubber chicken's name is Plucky. The clown's name is Sniffles. Sniffles's colleagues—Matey and Crack, also clowns—don't know her real name. She is a working-class gal trying to make good as a clown artist in a world of "corporate clowns." She is unrecognizable to society without her painted face and oversized accoutrements, and has no immediate family, aside from Plucky and her trick-turning dog, Chance. The three of them are an incomplete family, a lopsided act, living next to For-Salesville in rundown Baloneytown.

Just as there is something alluring about a plucked rubber chicken with its legs demurely crossed, so Clown Girl, a debut novel by Portland author Monica Drake, has its charms. The amount of clownish detail Drake invests in her characters makes it a fun, quick read. While Matey and Crack want to follow the money and reinvent her as a corporate clown, or cheap date for coulrophiles—clown fetishists—Sniffles aspires to something greater. She wants to make clowning high art. She reinvents herself as the fire-juggling Juicy Caboosy, a sassy clown with a mouthful of cracked one-liners about Gaza strippers and boob jobs. ("What do you mean, armed? These are boobs. I'm not armed, I'm boobed.")

The other neighborhood clowns in the novel—druggy clowns, pimp 'n' ho clowns, sellout clowns, fetishized clowns—are what Sniffles fears becoming. They are euphemisms for failure (just as, in Sniffles's world, two inflated blue balloons are a euphemism for Jesus on the cross).

Sniffles uses her art as a shield to avoid living a normal life. She never leaves the house without her clown mask in place, and takes clowning more seriously than she does her health. She doesn't sleep for days at a time. Her heart is weak, the sound of bees fills her head, and she must piss in a jug for science. Yes, it is a bit pathetic, but like the accomplished clown she is, even her personal tragedies manage to amuse.

Drake uses Sniffles's worsening health problems to signify emotional issues—loneliness, isolation—that the (inwardly) sad clown avoids dealing with. This technique is reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk's, who often destroys his characters' physical health to emphasize their emotional or psychological instabilities. The similarity between Drake and Palahniuk's style is more than coincidence: The two authors wrote in the same Portland writers' workshop for years. Palahniuk has even written Clown Girl's introduction, welcoming readers to "the book of my arch enemy."

Does Drake live up to Palah-niuk's flattering moniker? The novel isn't perfect. There is a love triangle involving two clowns and a knight in cop's armor that reads like a hammy caricature of Love Among the Hiccups. But as her concocted love story begins to reek of cheese, Drake shifts the readers' attention back to Sniffles's (and her own) strength: entertainment. While clowns are visual creations who rely on their physical presence to ensnare (or terrify) their audience, Drake very deftly translates that physicality to prose—and it comes off a lot better than her love story.

When Sniffles is perfecting her acts, she comes across as the artist she aspires to be. She twists balloon renditions of the Last Supper. She juggles fire like "harnessed meteors." She longs to create da Vinci's Madonna on the Rocks out of balloons, but so far she's only got John the Baptist and Baby Jesus down pat (Balloon Tying for Christ was the cheapest balloon manual she could find).

Clown Girl is awkward and gawky at points. Most first attempts at anything are awkward and gawky. But she has talent. When she has Sniffles reenact Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis—from the rhythmic pantomimed clicking of a typist seated at a desk, to the slight pause and cocked head of someone listening, back to methodical typing, squinting at the pages of imagined notes as the imagined typewriter reaches the end of a line and returns, and then Sniffles's shoulders slowly, imperceptibly hunch forward and her elbows come out, while the typing moves from smooth and efficient to harried and jerked, and the typist grows a thorax on which her head swivels about, insect-like, and suddenly "typing or flailing, it was one and the same: a menial job turned into a meaningless life, a short life, the life of an insect"—I had the urge to put the book down and applaud.

Monica Drake reads at Ravenna Third Place Books, 6504 20th Ave NE, 525-2347, Thurs Feb 15 at 7:30 pm, and it's free.