Leaving Munson

Stacey Levine's new novel asks: Is it real, or is it America?

By Stephen Beachy

FRANCES JOHNSON, Stacey Levine's latest novel, continues to map out the psychic territory of her first novel, Dra–, and her book of stories, My Horse and Other Stories. Levine's work is, at least technically, "surreal," but like much of the best writing that maps the borders between dreams and conscious life, its subtle disjunctions create a zone that often feels more real than "reality" itself. Although ages, species lines, and health are often slightly askew in Levine, these effects mimic the strange sensations of aging, being, more or less, human, and being ill in America in 2005. When Levine's adults are treated like children, it highlights not only the infantilizing nature of our institutions and our powerlessness in the face of larger social structures, but also the completely bizarre and inappropriate ways children themselves are routinely treated. When Levine's pets are overly controlled or neglected, when they die through human intervention or escape into the wild, it suggests a whole complex of messy issues involving human neediness and delusion. The constant presence of strange physical ailments is always as much about our anxiety-ridden culture as it is about the tenuous border between health, illness, and the ways we define either one.

Readers familiar with Levine's earlier work won't be surprised to find themselves in a town like Munson, where the residents occasionally develop scarred tissues and constantly debate the meaning of those tissues: commonplace, tumorous, benign? Just offshore, a volcano named Sharla occasionally spews its debris. Munson and its even less appealing sister city, Little-Munson, are located in Florida in the same way that postnuclear catastrophes are located in "Kansas" or horror movies are located on "Elm Street." Munson is a terrifying town because it is so barely surreal that it constantly reminds us how terrifying America really is.

Levine's newest heroine is Frances Johnson, a 38-year-old woman the town still considers to be just a girl. Compared to Levine's previous heroine, Dra – , Frances is positively willful, as if the hopeless and anxiety-ridden job-seeker from Levine's previous book had graduated from clinical depression to a more bipolar disorder and absorbed a healthy feminist sensibility along the way. Frances's scandalous talk of leaving Munson, and maybe Florida altogether, alarms the residents, a population generally disapproving of difference and change. Frances's stubborn resistance to the expectations of others comes sporadically, however. She lives in bursts of coffee-fueled action, careening through the Munson night on her bicycle, seeking advice and random conversation. But between these bursts come endless rounds of slumber. Pots of coffee to keep her going alternate with sleeping pills to put her down, and she'll sleep and sleep, waking just long enough to absorb another message of passive resignation from her social milieu before collapsing back into a medicated haze.

Frances's sensibility represents a shift not only in willfulness but in responsibility within Levine's work. Dra– was almost entirely helpless in the face of the social structures that surrounded her – a labyrinth of schools, hospitals, employment agencies, and therapy that blurred and merged into a kind of torture chamber. It often occurs to Frances, however, that the town she experiences as her tormentor is not just an alien force; she is the town too. The town is both inside her and a product of her own desires:

Munson folks, as a group, were opaque and rambling; they were aggressive, too, and perhaps fearful. Am I as afraid of the unknown as they? Frances wondered, restlessly pinching fingers along her skirt-hem. She could not determine it, nor did she know if it was the idea of leaving Munson that disturbed her, or virtually any decisive act at all.

For the most part these townsfolk, other than Frances, have resigned themselves to a vague collective consensus but sacrificed their own ability to influence that consensus. The exact mechanics of how "the town" has decided Frances must attend the annual dance to be wooed by the new doctor, Mark Carol, remain mysterious, but it is as if a decision has been made, despite completely varied investments in Frances's actions by a range of individuals. Even her lethargic boyfriend, Ray, has become part of the machinery, pressing her to embrace the inevitable, and almost mandatory, heterosexual coupling. After a brief sexual encounter with Ray, Frances muses aloud that it doesn't make sense to her: " 'Two adults, in the middle of the night ... one lying on top of the other.... ?' Frances felt out of sorts. 'Yes, it's awfully strange,' Ray agreed."

Frances doesn't care about Ray's childhood or his life before they met; nobody in this town is much concerned with understanding others, and it sometimes comes as a shock to Frances when she discovers that other people have desires that might involve her. Relationships are pieced together through collisions of self-absorbed individuals who can't even find games that aren't solitary. Rather than going along with Ray's misguided efforts to engage her in a game of hide and seek, after hiding himself for hours, Frances is furious: "She preferred to go into the cabin and play a quiet game by herself with a bowl of salty water, a religious-type game in which she imagined punishing and bathing herself and others." Frances has fond memories of the year she feigned illness and stayed home from school, staying on her bed for hours, "playing a game of her own invention with cardboard and needles, which had no human opponents and no ending." The unsatisfying social prospects in Munson encourage its residents to develop inner lives based on unshared obsessions. Her boyfriend's obsession is military history, and their relationship is based more on the comfort and familiarity of having each other in their vicinity than on any real passion or interest. Communality is based on attempts to engage others in personal quests, and occasionally it seems as if there might be a coordination of interests; Frances wants to leave Munson, and the town's current doctor needs someone to leave the state in order to acquire the crucial ingredient for the balm he is working on: chicken beak oil.

Will Frances go for the chicken beak oil? Will she go to the dance? Will she submit to the pressure to get together with the new doctor, or will she manage to leave Munson? Levine successfully uses traditional plot mechanics to invest the reader in an outcome that comes to seem terribly important, as we root for Frances to make a decision and to resist the social order of Munson. If Levine's worlds sometimes evoke those of French writer Marie Redonnet or Canadian Steve Wieners, these psychic zones are entirely her own, and the strange places Frances's journey takes her are never predictable. Levine always manages to surprise her readers with twists that are often hilarious and often slightly disturbing. If it feels like we've been here before, underneath this dance floor, gazing up at the townsfolk above, it is not because we've seen this landscape in other fictions, but maybe in a half-remembered dream. Levine is one of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense. Although her first two books from the now-defunct Sun and Moon Press are out of print, and increasingly difficult to find, she has found a new home with Oregon's Clear Cut Press.

Stephen Beachy is a frequent contributor to Lit.

Frances Johnson

By Stacey Levine. Clear Cut Press, 320 pages, $12.95 (paper).