Dour town

Photo: Alice Wheeler

From the get-go, it's clear that something strange is afoot in Munson, the fictional Florida hamlet where Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson, takes place. A volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead. Pets and people vanish. Unfurling over a period of days leading up to the town's annual dance, the story follows 38-year-old Frances's mounting restlessness, as she must decide whether to take control of her life or cede it to the murky future the community has designated for her. Though the novel hinges on a familiar plot point—will Frances remain in Munson, or escape to the world at large?—it's the only trace of convention to be found in this hypnotic book, which transforms its setting into a tableau of exotic menace.

"I didn't want it to be just a portrayal of people in small-town America—it's not that," Levine says, speaking from her home in Seattle. "It's more about a general human suspicion about outsiders." Frances is from Munson, but she seems to be the only one willing to acknowledge the town's eerie atmosphere of denial and xenophobia. Her apprehension is regarded as a form of betrayal, and it gradually becomes clear that the cultish people around her are ominously planning her fate. Everyone, including Frances's boyfriend, Ray, seems to be pushing her to marry the town's new doctor.

Levine's first book, My Horse and Other Stories (1993), won the PEN West award for fiction. Her novel Dra— (1997) featured a woman trying to navigate a dreary, hard-to-classify world—in this case, the halls of an anonymous office building. The author is less concerned with traditional plot development and resolution than she is with creating and sustaining a specific mood and sense of place. "In Frances Johnson, I was inter ested in thwarting standard fictional conventions like straightforward symbolism, plot-driven narrative, lush descriptions of setting," Levine says. "That, to me, makes for interesting fiction— when the undermining is done well."

Frances Johnson is being published by the small Oregon-based press Clear Cut, whose excellent, obsessively curated titles include Robert Glück's story collection Denny Smith and Charles D'Ambrosio's Orphans: Essays. Clear Cut authors have a sui generis aesthetic that you won't find in most mainstream fiction, and Levine is no exception. Her prose has an uncanny vibe—it's easy to grasp but at the same time full of twisted logic and weird lacunae. To increase the sense of disjointed paranoia, for instance, Levine's characters sometimes conduct conversations in a series of blurted non sequiturs.

The syntax in Frances Johnson is occasionally so bizarre and clever that it reads as if it were translated from another tongue. "I've always been interested in making the language sound off or odd," the author says. Though she owes a great deal to influences like Jane Bowles, Levine also found fodder in schlockier literature while writing her latest. "Part of my inspiration was pulp novels from the 1960s—I collect them. At one point, I got really into the nurse subgenre. There's one I really liked in particular called Small Town Nurse, by Jeanne Bowman. I would read parts of it to my friends at parties and we would just laugh, because it sounded like it had been translated from Urdu or something. It was so funny, so unclear. And really a delight. So that probably worked its way into my ear, too."

But however strange Levine's sentences are, she's always a highly controlled writer. She becomes almost gleeful when talking about revising and trying to strip her sentences of easy logic. "It's one of my favorite things to do: to go back and search for any clichés that might've been there and weed them out," she says. "Symbols, too. The color red, it has a history in symbolism and myth—it's going to mean something I may not have intended. I'm trying to corrupt and dismantle that. It's a huge challenge." With its union of the mystical and the mundane, Frances Johnson proves that Levine's meticulousness paid off.

Frances Johnson ($12.95 paperback) is out now from Clear Cut Press.