LEWISTON — Spooky coincidence?

Certainly. Brock Clarke’s latest novel, after all, follows a Danish cartoonist forced into hiding after his drawing of Muhammad sparks outrage. The parallels to the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris are too striking to ignore.

But it would be a mistake to think that ominous timing is the only thing driving Clarke’s quirky novel, “The Happiest People in the World.”

When Clarke invited questions from a group of young writers and readers at Bates College Thursday night, Charlie Hebdo was hardly mentioned at all. Instead, Clarke treated his audience to a reading of several chapters from the book, in which he describes the plight of Jens, the Danish cartoonist forced to flee to upstate New York where he takes a job as a guidance counselor under an assumed name.

It’s not terror that ensues, but hilarity. Mostly hilarity, anyway, as Clarke describes the fictional city of Broomeville, a tiny town that would be right at home further north in Maine, with its gazebo, its diner, its bar and its other bar.

In Broomeville, Clarke presents a strange mix of barmaids, school teachers and short-order cooks mingling with international terrorists and a refugee cartoonist trying to pose as a Swede named Henry.

There was far more laughter than political debate at Bates as Clarke described his characters, including one who “always looked like she was about to fall down” and another with a habit of saying “fair enough,” too much. Not to mention a would-be assassin frightened away by a young lady with a scary neck tattoo.

“I’m attracted to grotesque situations,” Clarke said, when asked to explain where that often dark humor comes from.

“To me,” he said, “comedy always comes out of frustration.”

Amazon’s Best Book of the Month for November 2014, the novel was described by The Wall Street Journal as a “dark and funny satire” that “reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.”

Yet, nobody Thursday night raised questions about the NSA, the Patriot Act or the fierce reaction to the Paris shootings. At the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, the students mostly wanted to know about his writing process now that Clarke is six novels into his career. They wanted to know what troubles he encounters as an author and how he overcomes them.

“Never have I written a book,” he told them, “where I think the idea is the problem.”

Instead, Clarke told them in his frank and self-deprecating way, he is sometimes vexed by laziness and impatience.

“I want the first attempt to work,” he said. “First attempts almost never work.”

A professor of English at Bowdoin College, Clarke has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, One Story, New England Review and Virginia Quarterly Review.

His appearance at Bates was part of the college’s Language Arts Live series. Since 1991, the college has hosted readings, class visits and residencies by more than 75 authors.

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