Stacey Levine has always been the bard of the marginal, the writer with the genius to destabilize a story with askew language and events. Her novels are also wince-inducingly funny, and Mice 1961, her first since Frances Johnson, is no exception. The new novel is set in an odd, artificial 1960s Florida, a confection made up of narrative and historical clichés peppered with realistic detail (just look up some of the geography!). There is talk about recipes and rock and jazz and Reds during an endless, mortality-obsessed potluck party in which the guests are plied with an endless supply of fruit juice. There are surfboards, secret military missions, even a nod to the alienation and sexual predations of men in gray suits. But things get weirder quickly and regularly, beginning with the eponymous figure of “Mice,” a bullied albino girl who lives with her glowering sister Jody and who builds ham radios and asks offhandedly disruptive questions. Mice’s other important attribute seems to be hiding and disappearing; the main arc of the story is the often-interrupted search by the narrator, Girtle, to track down Mice after she disappears in the face of the threat both of bullying teenagers and the demand by her sister that she come to the party and ask after a job on a bookmobile.
Mice 1961 is peopled with characters whose attributes we might remember from old children’s books, old romance novels, old TV shows, and the kind of old shibboleths that still show up on right-wing comment threads. The bullying pack of teenagers, like the teenagers in 60s movies, are often not teenagers at all, with girls in their late 20s still plaintively hanging on. There is a group of locals on the porch sitting in judgement on Mice’s purported shiftlessness and hideousness. Other characters are more singularly strange. There is a character nicknamed “The Blur,” a middle-aged man who continuously races around the neighborhood and who desperately wants to retake a long-ago math test so he can finally graduate from high school. There is also a censorious librarian who only gained a certain joie de vivre when her scheme to store underused books in a local cave led to all the books contracting destructive mold. Above all there is Mice herself, the “central girl” of the narrative but neither ingenue nor ugly duckling. With her thick glasses, orthopedic shoes, excessively pale skin, and white-blond eyebrows and hair, she is a parody of the standard object of bullying and perhaps a reviled embodiment of the fetish of whiteness that engulfs the novel’s world.
Whatever else Mice is, she keeps the novel going not just because she disappears but because of those relentless questions she asks. Her interjected, slant-truth queries call everyone and everything into further question. Here she is, asking her sister about an expression of frustration:
“Jo? Did you say ‘I can’t stand it’ because a minute ago I said I couldn’t stand the soup? Did my words influence your words?”
Here she artlessly asks the leader of the pack of teenagers pursuing her about her bullying language:
“Joyce—a minute ago you called me a brat. Did you call me a brat Joyce because your brother called you a brat the other day at Parrotts?” the girl asked, breathless, each such question as absolutely fresh to her as the very first question of her life.
A later example of this energetic probing is aimed at her fellow ham radio operator Lance:
She returned to what interested her. “Mr. Lance—a minute ago you said ‘crawling.’ Did you say that because there’s a beetle crawling right there?” She pointed to the ground, where a large copper-colored roach worried along the curb. “Sir the human mind works by association. People say what they see. Did you say ‘crawling’ because—”
“Go on home, Missy. You pick at things.”
Mice fact picks at the logic of things, the rationale for what we do and say, needling all the other characters with the idea that much of what people say is random, not intentional and meaningful. Mice’s questions suggest that much of what passes in fiction and in life for cause and effect, for plot and counterplot, is accidental and could just as well be otherwise.
As important as Mice is to moving and undermining the plot, the true “central girl” in this novel is the narrator, Girtle, who anxiously searches for Mice to get her to the potluck party and also worries aloud to us about how to keep the narrative from wrenching away from and erasing her role:
… the story itself with its claws would grub at the central girl, I believed, and I was right. It would indoctrinate her and tamp her down when her pursuits were not on point. The story, possessing the upper hand, would keep her miserably sanitized. Would I have any chance to outmaneuver […] the story itself?
The metafictional elements in this novel are unusual in Levine’s work but are integral to what the story is about: how both to tell a story and to live a life outside conventional tropes or choices. Girtle herself is another parodic outsider, almost a Dickensian orphan, running away from an institution in which “only a matron and one nice dog” were her friends, and making failed, desperately abject efforts to gain attention from the two sisters once she wheedles her way into their household. She offers to clean a chair’s legs if she may sit on it next to Jody, is consigned to sleeping on the pallet behind “the lint-colored couch,” longs for the togetherness that we may doubt actually exists between the two sisters, and is so altogether insignificant to others as to be virtually invisible. Her invisibility is another metafictional conceit, a joke on the narrator’s concocted role in telling the story, but it matches up with her anxiety about place and presence. Girtle describes her own role in the household as “sitting on a narrow shelf holding onto a flange” and this is an apt description of her anxieties as maker of the story, something she precariously grips as she foreshadows her replacement by a “helper character,” a brush-cut male from elsewhere who will push the “central girl” forward to a stock ending.
Not only does Girtle tell this story, her thoughts and desires animate it. Girtle surmises, she interjects, notices the odd and the untoward:
Against the lemon tree I began to drowse while watching hundreds of glossy ants moving up and down the creviced gray bark past my face—surely in search of valuable sugars or oils.
As she ostensibly looks back on this tale from old age, Girtle projects all over it, and what she projects is brilliantly untoward. The most oddly potent erotic moment in the novel comes when Mice picks a string from Girtle’s sweater and eats it, annoying Girtle but also, it seems, tantalizing her. Later, Girtle asks Mice to give her a stovetop signal that they will leave the party together:
“Come back!” I called, energetic and more myself than ever. “Listen—let’s stay at the party for twenty minutes and then leave for the cottage!”
“What cottage?”
“Darn it Mice! The cottage behind Stevens cornfield and close to Jupiter Gas where we’re going to sit on chairs in silence!”
That note about ants and oils, that eaten string, and that hoped-for communion of oblivion all suggest how deeply this story strays from the expected, on principle because, as Girtle puts it, “The main road is always broken or wrong, in any case.”
When it entered the English language sometime in the 16th Century, “queer” meant odd, notably unusual, eccentric. Stacey Levine’s language, plotting, and the very credo of her fiction are queer in this primordial sense, full of stunning disorientation. You won’t read anything else like Mice 1961, and you’ll have a blast reading it, too.
Mice 1961, by Stacey Levine. Portland, Oregon: Verse Chorus Press, March 2024. 260 pages. $17.95, paper.
Dave Karp is associated with Margin Shift, a Seattle, Washington, reading series dedicated to supporting writers outside the mainstream. His articles and reviews have appeared in Golden Handcuffs and Heavy Feather Review. He has taught high school English in Seattle for 26 years.
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