starting over
by
Douglas Messerli
Stacey
Levine Frances Johnson: A Novel (Astoria, Oregon: Clear Cut Press, 2005)
About
a third of the way through reading Stacey Levine’s new novel, Frances Johnson,
I commented to a friend that, unlike so many American fictions which seem to
plow through plot and character like a thresher moving down rows of corn (if
rows might be understood as chapters), this was a wonderfully lazy narrative, a
story that seemed to have no particular place to go and all the time in the
world to take you there.
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The jacket cover of this Green
Integer-size paperback compares Levine’s writing to that of Jane Bowles, and
there is a certain truth to that observation, particularly in the eccentricity
of Bowles’s characters who act less out of determination than from whim and behave
with an almost passive acceptance of forces beyond their control. Behind
Bowles’s writing, however, there are generally exotic, strange worlds (Panama,
Guatemala, Morocco, etc) that transform or at least inform both characters and
text. Although Levine has set her new fiction in Florida with a nearby volcano
to possibly stir things up, the small town of Munson —despite the daily
rumblings of the natural forces around it — is a drab world of dirt and mud.
Buildings, streets, homes, and general landscape are rarely described, and when
they are it merely confirms the feeling that the town and its citizens are
perpetually in a fog, enervated, unable to act. Accordingly, the fiction,
unlike more normative realist presentations with emphasis on place, centers itself
on character —particularly upon the thinking processes of its central figure,
Frances Johnson. And it is the languid revealing of this figure that seems to
slow the story down and to allow it to move in the multiple directions in which
Frances feels driven and pulled.
Midway through the book, as Frances
arrives at the house of her close friend Nancy (a house, incidentally, which
the author does describe and observes it as being “lovelier than any dwelling
in Munson, and perhaps for this reason folks bore her [Nancy] grudges”), Levine
admits to the very method of storytelling I had noted:
“Frances,
you recently told me you had several dreams about chopped onions,” and Frances
nodded rhythmically, smiling happily as the two women found the thread of a
familiar, meandering dialogue that proceeded in the halting yet serene manner
of a snail crossing a road over hours, unaware of time; and forgetting the time
indeed, not interested in turning back, the friends talked, less in a
conversation with a point than in a kind of unstoppable practice that neither
woman wished to end.”
Faced with such a linguistic construction
it would be almost pointless to describe the fiction’s “plot.” The story —for
those who must have one —is about a few days in Frances’ life in which she
suddenly takes stock of herself and feels drawn to make decisions about her
life: should she leave the small and grungy town of Munson and enter the world;
should she abandon her sexless relationship with Ray Mars, who the rest of the
townspeople, including Ray’s brother Kenny, feel is not good enough for
Frances; should she attend the annual town dance and be swept away in the arms
of the new town doctor Mark Carol?
These are the issues, along with others,
that suddenly face our hero, and are posed, along with questions with which the
author directly confronts the reader in her own series of interrogations such
as “To which places would Frances Johnson go?”
In search of answers, Frances goes many
places: to visit her friend and doctor Palmer, to speak to the owner of the
local diner, Mal, and, as previously mentioned, to visit Nancy. Yet none of
these people can answer for her, and each helps only to instill yet more
confusion as to what she should do. Mal insists she is sick and will die of some
dread disease; Palmer encourages her to leave town in search of vast oil
deposits that he needs for a balm he has concocted; and Nancy, who Frances
suddenly perceives is more ordinary that she imagined, asks her to help out in
cleaning and cooking for the impending visit of her children.
In the end none of these choices seem to
matter. Frances’s mother, a determined small-town woman who in her dominance of
her daughter has obviously helped to generate the young woman’s passivity,
insists that she attend the dance, where Frances is, so to speak, swept away
into the arms of Doctor Carol. But even this event has little significance as
the author hilariously pulls the rug out from under character and reader by
sending the mother back to the clearing where she has left her daughter lying
beside both Mark and Ray, to announce that the community has suddenly
determined Mark Carol is a no-good “crumb-bum!” “There are others, though,
Frances: you’ll see.” The story, accordingly, has the potential to start over. And
the reader —like Frances and Nancy in their conversations — has taken so much
pleasure in the telling of the story that, indeed, he is willing to read the
book —and experience these few days of her life —again.
Los
Angeles, October 25, 2005
Reprinted
from The New Review of Literature, Vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2006)
Reprinted
in Douglas Messerli, My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green
Integer, 2006).
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