Book Review: Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson

Frances Johnson must decide whether or not to go to the annual dance.

She must also decide whether or not to leave her confining small town life and strike out on her own. Mired in doubt, she must choose between acting on what others want for (and expect of) her and discovering what she wants for herself.

In many ways the basic skeleton of the Stacey Levine’s novel, Frances Johnson, resembles a spoof of the classic “coming-of-age” narrative.  Any attempt to fit the book into such a narrow category, however, quickly proves futile.

Read the full review after the jump.

Levine’s writing paints not so much a description of events, but rather the texture of Frances’s life in the town of Munson — and it is dark, uncertain, and, despite Levine’s dry humor, troubling. Small animals dart in and out of view. Local inhabitants subsist largely on a diet of crackers and butter. A volcano broods offshore, occasionally exploding debris into yards and gardens.

This mix of the real, the surreal, and the simply bizarre can be a bit dizzying at times. The narrative often creates a “dream-like” — even nightmarish — quality, but the border between dream and waking is porous and uncertain, the blurry edge of what could be and what is.

While one day “rooting for lost car parts,” for instance, Frances discovers a cave:

Scooting inside the hole, she shrieked, for she thought she saw three bats crawling in a circle. But it was merely an old can of peas with a torn label; looking up the rock passage then, Frances knew, as if some prognostic voice told her so, that a man lived in this cave, and that it was Ray Mars.

Ray Mars is perhaps a hermit squatting in a hole “filthy nearly to the point of being excretory,” perhaps a “handsome, well groomed man who stored his clothes neatly on a rock.” Neither possibility is ruled out: he could be one man or the other — or maybe only a figment of Frances’s imagination. The narrative provides no final resolution.

The cave scene foreshadows Frances’s ultimate decision to either take control of her life or continue living through others — and bear the resulting consequences. This connection eventually falls into place in retrospect, but despite the quirky charm of Levine’s prose, I found myself more than once questioning where her narrative style leaves me as a reader (“slightly lost” was my most frequent response).

This mild frustration aside, there is an undeniable elegance in the overall effect that the novel’s uncertainty creates. As a whole, the story resolves into much more than merely the sum of its parts. By defamiliarizing Frances’s surroundings, we see her dilemma in a new way: her quandary becomes less a question of making one choice or another, but rather an inquiry into the difficulty — if not the futility — of making rational life choices at all. Frances’s eccentric world, paradoxically enough, makes the core of her indecision all the more vital — even if, like the vague rumblings of one’s own deepest interiority, such vitality remains sometimes ridiculous and often difficult to pin down.

This newly revised edition of Frances Johnson, reissued by Verse Chorus Press, finally puts back into circulation the text that was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2005 and which surely played no small part in winning Levine the Stranger Genius Award for Literature in 2009.

Frances Johnson is not a novel to approach with a penchant for multitasking, but it is one that rewards an attentive reading with a refreshing glimpse into Levine’s original and intriguing literary world.