Frances Johnson [Paperback]

Stacey Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2005

Frances Johnson doesn’t want to attend the town dance. But there is pressure. The people of Munson, her small Florida town, make their needs known: Ray, her boyfriend who is “overfocused on world history”; Mal, the horsey, earnest, fry cook at Mal’s Pico Diner, who offers her his cabin;Palmer, the town doctor who can find no cure for the mysterious scar Frances bears; her mother, speaking to her through “the mechanical screeching” of Munson’s patched telephone lines. Nearby, a volcano the townspeople call “Sharla” spews lava and stones, lighting the night sky with its portentous burning. At once measured and suspenseful, Frances Johnson is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Jane Bowles.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Should Frances Johnson leave her hometown of Munson, Fla. to search for chicken-beak oil, the missing ingredient for Dr. Palmer's secret balm? Or should she marry Mark Carol, the new doctor in town, though he hasn't proposed and there's little indication that he's even interested? Frances's military-history obsessed boyfriend, Ray Garn, encourages her to do the latter, even though Ray and Frances are currently living together. Meanwhile, outside town, there's an undersea volcano that erupts with some regularity. If Frances's life sounds random, that's because it is. What makes the book compelling, much like Levine's debut novel, Dra—, is its play of words and images, its irregular pacing and its capture of what it means to be trapped in a life with meaningless choices. Frances spends a night with a man who lives in a cave, discovers a scar on her leg that may or may not be a tumor and kisses her boyfriend's brother for no apparent reason and to no apparent consequence. Each vignette has a strange, almost possible quality. "For how long will Frances Johnson go in circles?" the omniscient narrator asks rhetorically at one point. Readers of this pocket-sized book will indulge her as long as she likes. (Feb.)
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Review

"In Levine, Clear Cut has found an author who writes extraordinary sentences." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"One of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense." -- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"This hypnotic book transforms its setting into a tableau of exotic menace." -- Time Out New York

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Clear Cut Press (December 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972323465
• ISBN-13: 978-0972323468
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,441,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stacey Levine wrote My Horse and Other Stories (PEN/West Fiction Award), The Girl with Brown Fur, and the novels Dra--- and Frances Johnson (Finalist, Washington State Book Award). A Puschcart Prize nominee, her fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fence, Tin House, The Fairy Tale Review, Seattle Magazine, The Washington Review, Santa Monica Review, Yeti, and other venues. She has written for The Chicago Reader, The Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Her one-act play, Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small, was published by Belladonna Books NYC. She received the 2009 Stranger Genius Award for Literature. Her fiction has been translated into Danish and Japanese.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Quirky Tale of Individuation, March 6, 2006

By 

A reader (Detroit, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frances Johnson (Paperback)

Frances Johnson is stuck: in a passionless relationship with her longtime suitor, Ray; in the small town, Munson, where residents eat hard crackers for every meal; at the edges of her own self which Frances, at age 38, characterizes as neither woman nor girl. Most of all, Frances Johnson is stuck beneath the oppressive infantalizing of a blaring mother who criticizes Frances' wardrobe and relationships with equal verve. This is a simultaneously poignant, hilarious and heart-wrenching tale of individuation with all the sparse, existential humor of Beckett, the off-beat metaphorical imagery of Kafka, and the poetic, textured syntax of Duras. Once again, Stacey Levine shines as one of contemporary fiction's most gifted voices.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars modern-day fable, January 10, 2011

By 

wordtron (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Frances Johnson (Paperback)

the most unusual, original novel i read this year. brilliantly weird and funny. a kind of modern-day fable. every sentence sneaks open the strangeness of reality. makes most writing seem dull and safe. but it's not unapproachably avant-garde. it's ve...morethe most unusual, original novel i read this year. brilliantly weird and funny. a kind of modern-day fable. every sentence sneaks open the strangeness of reality. makes most writing seem dull and safe. but it's not unapproachably avant-garde. it's very earthy and droll.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An original, hilarious vision, April 16, 2006

By 

Cecilia E. Kirk "Reader" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frances Johnson (Paperback)

Frances Johnson is a deeply funny, haunting book that obsessed me during the weeks I read it. Stacey Levine's prose is simple, but it leads you in directions you never expect. Like her first novel, Dra__, Frances Johnson seems in a submerged way to be about sexuality, and also identity, individuality, stuntedness, the endless circularity of human feelings. Levine sets her story in a drab landscape and renders it in prose that is often laugh-out-loud funny. Echoes of Kafka's bleak yet empathetic vision are frequent, as are moments of Jane Bowles and possibly Carson McCullers.

Levine sets her novel in Munson, a fictional Florida town where conformity is a mania-the only mania. There is virtually no other energy on hand. So while Frances lives in semi-contented mutual lassitude with boyfriend Ray, she is repeatedly urged by other characters to find someone better, specifically the almost camp figure of Mark Carol, a Hollywood-style doctor bachelor who arrives in town just in time for the biggest event of the year - the town dance. Even Ray urges Frances toward Mark Carol: "Frances ... everyone in town wants you to begin your life in earnest; we both know it's true!"

Levine keeps asking, in the book, `Where will Frances Johnson end up?' We watch Frances crash around in darkness, fall asleep, run from one person to another for advice - do anything but move purposefully forward. Will she sense her real desires, and will she be able to do anything about them? That's the question the book daringly poses - after all, it's a question that confronts all of us - while the story seems to putt around in weird, obscured landscapes getting basically nowhere. I admire the way Levine writes about something real and articulable without articulating it - instead, her narrative emulates the groping that is really done to reach it. Brilliant.

As with Dra__, Levine's vision in this novel gestures toward a larger condition. The conformity that spreads throughout the story like a smothering blanket is emblematic of the torpor of current American culture. To me, this is the most brilliant aspect of a book full of unusual and witty surprises. Like a dream that never ends, the novel continually returns to the image of Frances on her bicycle, peering through fog, trying to reach someone who will provide some clarity. Often, Frances is trying to get to Nancy, an older woman whose conversations with Frances sound like therapy sessions. Nancy's attention enthralls Frances; she wishes at one point she could never leave the older woman's presence. But at another point Nancy makes it clear she has needs of her own, and it rattles the perfection of their relationship. Throughout the novel, the simple act of being with another human is rife with trouble - far from an unfamiliar theme, but rendered by Levine with highly original strokes.