Frances Johnson: A Novel

by Stacey Levine

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.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, Contemporary

230 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

About the author

Stacey Levine is the author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist Mice 1961. Her other books--The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, Dra---, and My Horse and Other Stories, have a devoted following of readers.

Levine's work has garnered a Pulitzer Prize fiction finalist nomination, a PEN fiction award, and Stranger Genius Award in Literature. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Iowa Review, Yeti, The Fairy Tale Review, Your Impossible Voice, Golden Handcuffs Review, and other venues.

A collection of all her short fiction, plays, and co-authored comics to date will be published in 2026.

www.staceylevine.com

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stalled in her personal growth at the murky age of 38, Frances Johnson lives a vague sleepy existence in the insular small town of Munson, Florida. And I mean literally sleepy, as she sleeps a lot in this novel⁠—particularly throughout the middle section⁠—and certain scenes even read like dreams. Frances's story brims with casual absurdisms and droll encounters with various oddball townsfolk, all of whom are overly concerned about her future. Her boyfriend Ray can't string a conversation together without allusions to war and the military, while his firefighter brother Kenny persists in introducing Frances to other men. Frances thinks her doctor Palmer may hold the key to her escape from this stultifying existence in Munson when he proposes she assist him in procuring an essential ingredient to a new medical breakthrough he is developing. Meanwhile, a new doctor in town, Mark Carol, has wowed all the townspeople, all of whom now seem convinced that Frances should take up with him instead of Ray. The plot, such as it is, fades in and out of focus as it meanders toward a possible climax at the annual town dance. Will Frances attend? Will she finally leave Munson? The answers to those questions become less important than the dynamics between the characters and the incessant puzzling over what it means to live a life, regardless of where you put down your roots. The mechanics of story construction Levine employs here are similar to those used in her first novel Dra–, as is her liberal inclusion of absurdity and non sequiturs. I can't help thinking that many heavily workshopped MFA novels could be this good if their heart and soul were not inevitably excised during said workshopping. Notably, Levine eschewed the MFA and instead attended journalism school, which some of my other recent reading has also indicated could be a helpful though perhaps not obvious choice of foundation on which to build a successful fiction writing career.

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levine's slight surrealism typified by her simple language, her off details, and her characters who all seem to be psychically hemorrhaging, is so so fun to read. At once disorienting (like a tilt-a-whirl) and a solid satire of American living. I take a secret sixth star, cut it up, and sprinkle it over the five stars I've already given to this book.

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre. A soporific blending of congruent genres, a parasitic symbiosis of: Southern gothic, ameliorated with Kavanesque surrealism, Vian inspired local talent, and complete with a Leonora Carrington underground chamber of ‘birth’. Levine seems to have siphoned off the meta structure of the crème of the crop in the surrealism and dream sequence ouvre, and chisels it into a malleable texture of repressed psychosis.

Munson is a small Florida town (but its still southern gothic, I tell you), where Lovecraft has passed through and painted it sinister with portentious and undefinable apprehension. Frances Johnson is a middle aged woman who spends her time navigating the portal between consciousness and dreams. She has a boyfriend who, apparently, she doesn’t sleep with, and who tries to pawn her off to every eligible man in town. And a mysterious necrotizing tumour on her thigh, a possible lesbian affection to her best friend Nancy and what I am dead certain are regular hysterical paroxysm alleviation sessions with the hermaphroditic town doctor, who wants to send her on out of state errands to seek out chicken beak oil(!). Her face mysteriously alternates between facial droop and muscle tone regeneration, except when that happens she breaks out into hives.

This is the type of silly putty which some authors can sculpt into a masterpiece, but for others emerges only half baked from the kiln. I can see the merits, and the potential here, but it didn’t quite make the cut, for me.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

When does life begin, and how can it? How should one know when, and when it does, what kind of person they should be? What can anyone do, or know, about what they are or should be? A low-level humming of unease and discomfort, like faint nausea or a mysterious scar that won't quiet heal.

Reads as a kind of amorphous surreal americana about diffuse and problematic identity, or the failure to exert one, but in fact its strangeness comes via another lineage: the nurse novel.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

phew, frances johnson is from a small town in florida called munson, near a smaller town called little-munson, but those folks seem inferior. munson has a volcano that pretty much continually spews lava, ash, and fog. i have clear cutters in my town. frances johnson's dog ran off and she thought it was living in the alley with the wild animals. she thought she heard missie, her dog, in a little cabinet under the pavilion dance floor, but it was locked. she sent THE MEN to make a key, but we never learn if it was really missie or not. frances has trouble sleeping and rides her bike, a lot. are there any other bike riders in munson? there are not, in my town. will frances grow? the fog fills her lungs sometimes. The mud changes color over time, from pretty pink to brown with green things, like specks, in it. "What kind of pattern brings no relief?"
Ray: "Dont' know, Frances," he muttered in his sleep.

[🐴 🍖]

file alongside dan by joanna ruocco under "it made me feel like there was a gas leak in the room, but in a good way." v refreshing to come across a novel that's garnered jane bowles comparisons and actually has that jane bowles sense of pervasive wrongness kinda thing going on (blurbs mentioning jane bowles typically being as reliable as blurbs mentioning t-pynch or dfw -- viz., not in the slightest). next time your doctor asks you to cross state lines in search of chicken beak oil let this book serve as your guide

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and sad, and full of little softnesses, where Frances Johnson is going, and where Frances Johnson is discovering, and where Frances Johnson does not know who Frances Johnson is because she has a soft border, like the cover of the book suggests, where her body and her being melts into her town Munson, which she hates but can't help defending, and the things that make her feel new resolve (I especially relate to this) but slowly dissipate or dissolve or get mixed up with other voices, with other people's wills.

"Well, aside from a soldier, who else would you like to be, if only for just a little instant?" She grasped his wrist lightly. "A movie-star?"
"Well..."
"Just tell me, Ray--who? Please? Could it be Jerry Welworth?"
"Ah, Welworth's all right, but he's not my favorite actor. No, I'm thinking of someone better. Hmmm. Do y'know how trumpet players march on the field?"
"Those who play in the marching band?"
"Yes," he said, growing quietly excited. "Band members, well...they're on their own, yet they're part of something, too. They just march along. It's not easy, but it's not awfully hard!"
"Why, that's true," she said wonderingly.
"No one can disturbe a band member or get them worried. They're protected by the whole group and their instrument. I like it! They just play. They have something important to do. Band members are invisible, don't you think, Frances? That makes them free. I've seen a trumpeter--"
"Me too, actually! On the high school field."
"Yes! I watched him; he was just a faraway speck, but I felt so close to him!" Ray breathed, his face mottling with pink.
"I know that type of thing," she said. "It's a relief to watch someone like that."
"Life didn't bother him at all. He had his job to do. He just marched, part of the band, blending right in, and he didn't feel worried or strained about anything. I wanted to be him so badly!" Ray paused. "But later, Frances, it was too much. I couldn't watch anymore. I wanted to run away, never see him again!"
She waited. "It's good to think of other lives."
"But not any old life. Not someone from Little-Munson."
"Why couldn't it be someone from Little-Munson, Ray? I don't see why not."
"Well, they're troubled over there, Frances."
"Aren't you troubled?" She took his upper arm, squeezing it fondly, looking at Ray up-close, seeing him clearly, and Frances was glad.
He smiled. "No, for this game, it has to be someone good and right-minded. It could be someone living far away, like a man in the government. It could be a famous sportsman."
"It could be someone ordinary, but great."
"It could be a blind person," Ray said.
"It could be anyone, really."
p.160-162

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Without thinking, she turned to the bed and kissed Ray's cheek, then kissed it again and again, an activity that made so little sense to her that she could not stop, for each kiss was both the beginning of a chance to understand the thing and a way to avoid it."

"Frances had begun to discover the quiet adventure of knowing another human being, and with this came the desire to flee."

"Frances did not know why, but it seemed she and Nancy had always been racing toward a horizon together, and at the race's end, each woman would stop suddenly, realizing she had lost sight of the other for good. The final moment of their friendship would be abrupt, she thought, and would contain so much distended regret that it would need to be siphoned away, as if through a pipeline to the sea."

"Frances was regretful. For the second time in a day, she had failed to understand a kiss."

You can't get sentences like this if you go around trying to make sense all the time.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 very earthy and droll.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice book. I will read this again later on and probably more times later on.

[Ben Bush · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had been sitting on my shelf for about five years and then recently I started to hear a lot of good things about Levine's writing and the book lives up to it. I think the reason I was initially turned off by it is that the premise of young woman struggles to leave a claustrophobic 1950s small town felt painfully familiar, although if I were pressed on the subject I wouldn't be able to say where I'd actually seen such a scenario depicted before. But Levine manages to make it really odd and her own. I guess I might call it kitchen sink surrealism. It's pretty interesting writing on a sentence-level. It's understated but often laugh out loud funny. The humor always stays just below the surface. There's a particular attention to male-female power dynamics and in particular to the ways that we often give up power that no one has actually taken from us. The pacing is strange and it occasionally feels somewhat plot-less, which it actually isn't but manages to feel that way anyway some of the time. There's great comic bits about fantasizing about the moment when you will forget the moment you're currently in and speculating about how battles get names, also the scene's with the town's suicidal dancer were great. Also, the sheer volume of odd, highly specific gestures that she's thought of is a real feat. I'm not actually sure that I would recommend this book to people since it seems hard to anticipate whether people would love it or hate it, but it certainly seemed to have plenty to say to me at the moment it caught me.

***SPOILER?****
I read the whole thing thinking the ending was a foregone conclusion with full acceptance of that only to be surprised and disturbed by the ending, which does a pair of odd, exciting tonal shifts in quick succession. Also, a few unexpected appearances of direct address to the reader didn't hurt the story but I wasn't sure that it added anything.

[Christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waivered on giving this 4 or 5 stars, then when seeing that 5 truly meant it was 'amazing' I had to go with it as it was well, amazing! It's an awkward odyssey at once funny and sad and seems (at least to me) as an impetus for great introspection. Apart from the story, this book deserve 5 stars simply for the sentences. It all flows so clearly and simply, yet is rife with imagery and atmosphere. I think it a very difficult task and one overlooked by many writers and readers today.

[Cyndi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will most definitely be getting a book subscription to Clear Cut Press.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, complex and quiet...the articulate expression of a part of the human spirit that lingers, shyly, in the background of louder tales.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creepy, funny. Beautifully written. Moving. I have to think more about this one.

[Robert Corbett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A careful reader of Frances Johnson will realize the book is a "pot boiler" in a pulpy 50s sense. The question, announced very early, is what will Frances Johnson do? (Sometimes it also who will Frances be?) The language can seem corny, but that manner is background for more disturbing observations, like the volcano which creates--in some sense, literally--the atmosphere of the novel. And the question at the heart of the novel, and because the subject is a woman, feminist, is identity. A very specifically feminist question, since it is, will Frances marry? Will Frances leave Munson on the errand Palmer sets for her? She can save the town with her marriage to a doctor, she can become something different by leaving. (Surely this has not yet disappeared as a wicked binary for young women in small towns.) It is not saying to much that these questions seem to begin to wind up in a typically novelistic way to a conclusion. Yet it would be shame to miss exceptional descriptions--sometimes numinous--of Nature, and on point psychological observations. Frances Johnson is consciously generic, again inhabiting a genre of salacious covers, but it speaks in a doubled way of the life we live now. Perhaps the setting proposes, have things really changed in what we think is this ever renewing country those of us in the US live in. In short, just read closely, maybe you too will hear Frances speaking for you on another frequency.

[Zach]

I actually didn't finish this book. It's a really intriguing look at an iconoclastic woman and her somewhat odd companions, told in unconventional style. The narrative is pretty straightforward, but the characters' thought processes, dialogues, and motivations are not. I could not devote my full attention to it before it was due back at the library, and I was unable to renew it. I'll give author Stacey Levine another try, sometime, though.

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the tone of this book and the characters. It's what critics would call a comedy of manners. It's also a bit of a spoof on pulp romances of the 1950's. It touches on the roles of women in a small town - who you should marry - and presents a conundrum I've faced in my own life: stay in your home town with the comforts of familiarity or head out into the world chasing the promise (or is it a dream) of a better world.

[Kaushik Viswanath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the circular, haunting nature of this novel. Frances Johnson's psychosis is that she has a niggling sense of how psychotic her town really is.

[Michael Shou-Yung Shum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly unique novel.

[Talita]

It's pretty good but better read in one or two sittings. The ending is perfect.

[Maryjmetz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I confess I'm stumped as to how to start this review because, gosh, this book was just awful. I read it through to the end but only because that's what I do. The *best* thing to be said for this book, at least in this edition, is that it's small and lightweight; it won't weigh you down. But the writing, the story, the characters: what the hell? I read and appreciated "Ulysses." James Kelman's "How Late It Was, How Late" was a book I thoroughly enjoyed. I don't *think* that I'm too thick to appreciate an author who plays with words or who chooses to be unconstrained by grammar or the most basic rules of structure. In this case, I didn't so much feel that the author was daring or creative; it truly felt like she just didn't have a clue. That's probably unfair but whatever she was attempting, if she was attempting anyting, didn't work. It read like a bad first draft of a first bad novel.
Would Frances Johnson find a way?
How would Frances Johnson negotiate this day?
Who could Frances Johnson be?
Who the fuck cares?

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy entry in the Bowlesian (Jane not Paul) novel canon, by which I mean any novel that somewhat resembles what happens if you leave the Sims on autoplay and write down what happens. I didn't realize what this was up to until about halfway through when it finally dawned on me that this was a spoof of a certain kind of pulp fiction for young girls in the 20th century, and then I thought lovingly of Padgett's Motor Maids Across the Continent. While this doesn't quite reach those surreal, sublime heights, I still absolutely loved so much about this. Palmer's balm oil. Stinky's cave. Ray's obsession with Napoleon. Frances searching for moist towelettes. The cellar beneath the dance floor where a lake once sat.

[Judy Bart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't ask. I have no idea what this book was about. It got rave reviews, but then again so did the movie The Tree Of Life, so some folks really like this type of vague, ambiguous other-wordly writing. I am not one of them. I tried to put it down but I kept waiting for it to make sense. Was it a dream, was it a futuristic creation or was it just crap? Then again, who cares? Don't read it unless you like to be confused.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book and I did love the sentences but I couldn't get into it. Levine is a fantastic writer but I'm not at the point where I can read a novel without much of a plot, or at least a trajectory. I would have rather this been short fiction.

[Ofelia Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sentences in this book are all very good. A couple parts are very funny with strange and interesting dialog. There's bike-riding and a volcano and a dance.

[kim McRad · Rating 3 out of 5]

i enjoyed her style of writing just not so impressed with the story itself. i kept waiting for it to pick up or to find out more but it mever happened.

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a weird book about a weird town with a sinister undercurrent never fully explored.