Frankland: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Whorton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 21, 2004

With his offbeat sense of humor and down-home Southern sensibility, James Whorton has been compared to luminaries such as John Kennedy Toole and Carson McCullers. He sharpens his cutting wit to a keen edge in Frankland, following the misadventures of a wannabe academic who goes hunting for a secret history and gets much more than he bargained for.

John Tolley is a bumbling college dropout who yearns to become a bowtie-wearing, pipe-smoking historian. When he hears that Andrew Johnson's lost papers may have been preserved by an heir in Tennessee, he grabs his tweed jacket and heads south, convinced that he'll discover the key to a groundbreaking biography on the seventeenth U.S. president and the start of a respectable career.

But things start to go awry when his car breaks down in the town of Pantherville, Tennessee. Tolley rents a decrepit shack owned by a neurotic ex-con and is soon sucked into a world of cockfights, coon dogs, and the politics of Pantherville's good old boys. Surrounded by folks as eccentric as he is, including an alluringly shy mail carrier named Dweena, Tolley starts to feel at home -- even if his quest for academic glory might just prove to be a wild goose chase. Native and newcomer, highbrow and hillbilly cross paths and tangle hilariously in this wry and ribald tale.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A smart, slightly hapless 28-year-old amateur historian aspires to change his fortunes by locating a lost set of President Andrew Johnson's papers in Whorton's winning second novel (after 2003's Approximately Heaven). John Tolley, somewhat cowed by six ill-advised months in New York City ("Can a person so easily whipped as this look forward to any success in life?"), buys a junker from his crooked landlady's crooked nephew and sets out for Johnson's home state of Tennessee—to the eastern counties that Johnson once suggested should become their own state of "Frankland." That Johnson's presidency was widely regarded as a dismal failure doesn't stop Tolley from nosing around the remote, somewhat backward portions of Tennessee, a stranger in a strange land full of colorful locals who understand him just slightly less than he understands them. His quest for nuggets of Johnson-related gold veers off course when he finds himself entangled in a local lottery scandal; other distractions come in the form of friendly locals, including the diminutive hillbilly Boo Price and Dweena, his postal-carrier cousin; there's also Danielle, a visiting would-be television producer from New York, and Professor Luke Van Brun, the backstabbing editor of a history journal who first snubs Tolley and then tries to get to the Johnson papers first. Warm characterization, quiet but exuberantly sly wit and a winning narrator add up to a thoroughly enjoyable escapade.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

After six months of trying to make it as a professional historian in New York despite his lack of a bachelor's degree, 28-year-old John Tolley heads south. He believes he might discover the lost scrapbook of Andrew Johnson, America's seventeenth president (who never got a bachelor's degree, either--or, for that matter, a grade-school degree).But John's smoke-belching car ends up breaking down in Pantherville, Tennessee, where he rents a rundown cottage from a fellow named Boo and begins to fall for Boo's cousin, Dweena. Pantherville is populated entirely by comic eccentrics, and in that sense alone, John fits in. Pompous, tactless, and yet oddly likable, John is something of a Yankee Ignatius J. Reilly--and while the first-person voice here doesn't match A Confederacy of Dunces, John's unreliable narration is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. A subplot involving a proposed state lottery and a tabloid-TV reporter falls flat compared to the charm of John's quixotic search for Johnson's scrapbook, but readers will forgive such missteps and heartily enjoy this comic romp through the great state of Tennessee. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; aFirst Edition First Printing edition (December 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743244486
• ISBN-13: 978-0743244480
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,077,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Whorton Jr. is author of the novels Angela Sloan, Frankland, and Approximately Heaven. A former Mississippian and former Tennessean, he lives in Rochester, New York with his wife and their daughter. He teaches at SUNY Brockport.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mostly Solid Effort, But Watch Your Footing, December 27, 2004

By 

Benjamin K. Potter "loyal reader/writer" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Frankland: A Novel (Hardcover)

This was a good find that turned into a light, enjoyable read. Quirky characters really catch the essence of East Tennessee. The cover promises work on par with Mark Twain or John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces). The book didn't deliver on this high promise, but it does sort of read like "A Confederacy Of Dunces" kid brother.

We follow John Tolley from New York to the wilds of Pantherville, a "blink-and-you-miss-it" town in Eastern Tennessee. He is a misguided, if optimistic, historian in search of an Andrew Johnson scrapbook that may or may not exist. Along the way, he meets a collage of offbeat citizens, including Dweena, a post-office worker, her cousin who trains coon dogs, and a snobby New York t.v. producer looking for a scoop on a mysterious infant rash.

If you care about the Volunteer State or enjoy light-hearted farces, this may be an excellent read for you. Expect to get pelted with a lot of mostly useless Tennessee trivia. The dialogue also reads uneven (realistic dialogue is a longstanding pet peeve of mine). Otherwise, good on author James Whorton. He put together a fine piece of work.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious romp, March 17, 2005

By 

John Henry Fleming (Tampa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Frankland: A Novel (Hardcover)

This really is a funny book. The comparisons to Confederacy of Dunces are no lie; the main character, John Tolley, an amateur Andrew Johnson scholar, has the same mix of cluelessness and erudition as Ignatius Reilly, and one of the book's great pleasures is that Tolley also serves as narrator. His voice alone is enough to carry the book. But there's a strong cast of characters along for the ride, all of them both odd and real. There's also a really engaging plot with scraps of mystery and conspiracy of the East Tennessee variety. The dialogue is sharp, the writing first-rate. Buy it; you won't regret it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loving This Book in East TN, September 18, 2005

By 

Jamie Cyphers (Kingsport, TN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Frankland: A Novel (Hardcover)

I had a great time with this book! Being from East TN, it felt like coming home! The "quirky" characters were relatable to many of the natives I've known during my lifetime of growing up here. There were several times I laughed out loud during this book! Being a former student and huge fan, this is not the first book I've read of Mr. Whorton's. In both of his books, I've found his attention to detail and thorough description to be dead-on (especially in Approximately Heaven). I look forward to the next one!