Frankland
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
With his offbeat sense of humor and down-home Southern sensibility, James Whorton has been compared to luminaries such as John Kennedy Toole and Carson McCullers. He sharpens his cutting wit to a keen edge in Frankland, following the misadventures of a wannabe academic who goes hunting for a secret history and gets much more than he bargained for.
John Tolley is a bumbling college dropout who yearns to become a bowtie-wearing, pipe-smoking historian. When he hears that Andrew Johnson's lost papers may have been preserved by an heir in Tennessee, he grabs his tweed jacket and heads south, convinced that he'll discover the key to a groundbreaking biography on the seventeenth U.S. president and the start of a respectable career.
But things start to go awry when his car breaks down in the town of Pantherville, Tennessee. Tolley rents a decrepit shack owned by a neurotic ex-con and is soon sucked into a world of cockfights, coon dogs, and the politics of Pantherville's good old boys. Surrounded by folks as eccentric as he is, including an alluringly shy mail carrier named Dweena, Tolley starts to feel at home -- even if his quest for academic glory might just prove to be a wild goose chase. Native and newcomer, highbrow and hillbilly cross paths and tangle hilariously in this wry and ribald tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A smart, slightly hapless 28-year-old amateur historian aspires to change his fortunes by locating a lost set of President Andrew Johnson's papers in Whorton's winning second novel (after 2003's Approximately Heaven). John Tolley, somewhat cowed by six ill-advised months in New York City ("Can a person so easily whipped as this look forward to any success in life?"), buys a junker from his crooked landlady's crooked nephew and sets out for Johnson's home state of Tennessee to the eastern counties that Johnson once suggested should become their own state of "Frankland." That Johnson's presidency was widely regarded as a dismal failure doesn't stop Tolley from nosing around the remote, somewhat backward portions of Tennessee, a stranger in a strange land full of colorful locals who understand him just slightly less than he understands them. His quest for nuggets of Johnson-related gold veers off course when he finds himself entangled in a local lottery scandal; other distractions come in the form of friendly locals, including the diminutive hillbilly Boo Price and Dweena, his postal-carrier cousin; there's also Danielle, a visiting would-be television producer from New York, and Professor Luke Van Brun, the backstabbing editor of a history journal who first snubs Tolley and then tries to get to the Johnson papers first. Warm characterization, quiet but exuberantly sly wit and a winning narrator add up to a thoroughly enjoyable escapade.
