New Alabama Book: Frank Turner Hollon’s ‘Austin and Emily’

Baldwin County novelist Frank Turner Hollon is back with a new book, Austin and Emily, and the story is every bit as offbeat as its two main characters. The novel pairs two of the more unlikely romantic leads in recent Southern fiction and sends them on a cross-country journey that doubles as a meditation on what love is actually for.

Austin McAdoo is a 347-pound man with a dry wit and a fondness for canned ham. Emily Dooley is a fiery, unpredictable woman with a short temper and a simple way of looking at the world. The pair could hardly be more different in appearance or personality, yet the moment they cross paths in a Tampa strip club, they fall hard for each other. Hollon’s premise is that romance pays no attention to the categories everyone else uses — age, appearance, decorum, common sense — and the novel runs with that idea at full speed.

The star-crossed duo piles into a car full of cats and heads toward Los Angeles on a quest for lasting happiness along the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Their long, strange journey to a modern-day Oz becomes a comical look at romance and the absurdity of life. The road-trip structure lets Hollon move his mismatched couple through a series of encounters that test, bend and reaffirm their devotion to each other, with the cats riding along as a kind of Greek chorus of chaos.

The novel suggests there are no halfway measures when it comes to love — you either believe in it or you do not. That binary is the book’s philosophical spine: Austin and Emily are not sensible people by anyone else’s standard, but they are entirely certain about each other, and the novel asks whether that certainty is foolishness or the only kind of wisdom that matters.

A Baldwin County Writer With a Growing Shelf

Hollon, who lives in Baldwin County with his wife and children, has built a steady career as an Alabama writer. His earlier titles include The God File, A Thin Difference, The Point of Fracture, The Wait, and Life Is A Strange Place, the last of which was adapted into the film Barry Munday. A film version of his novel Blood and Circumstance is currently in production.

That screen track record is unusual for a novelist working from the Gulf Coast. Barry Munday, the adaptation of Life Is A Strange Place, brought Hollon’s comic sensibility to theaters, and the ongoing production of Blood and Circumstance gives him two novels with Hollywood connections — a testament to how readily his darkly funny, character-driven stories translate off the page. His fiction tends to center on people navigating circumstances they did not choose, finding both trouble and tenderness along the way, and Austin and Emily continues that pattern with its two seekers driving west.

Hollon’s place in Alabama letters is part of a strong literary tradition on the Gulf Coast, a region that has produced an outsized share of the state’s novelists. Writing from Baldwin County — Fairhope in particular has a long association with writers and artists — he joins a community whose work often trades in the comic absurdity that hides inside everyday Southern life. Austin and Emily, with its canned ham, its carful of cats and its improbable lovers, is that tradition in its purest form.

The Road to the Walk of Fame

The journey at the center of the novel works as both plot and metaphor. The Hollywood Walk of Fame — the destination Austin and Emily fix on — represents the standardized version of happiness: fame, recognition, a star with your name on it. What the pair actually finds on the road is the unstandardized version, the kind that cannot be earned or purchased, which is the novel’s quiet punchline beneath the comedy.

The comic engine of the book is the friction between its leads and the world they pass through. Austin’s deadpan self-possession and Emily’s short fuse produce the kind of double act that carries a novel across two thousand miles of highway, and Hollon lets neither character become a joke: Emily’s simplicity is a form of clarity, and Austin’s wit is armor for a man the world has repeatedly underestimated. Readers who have spent time with Hollon’s earlier work will recognize the author’s fondness for outsiders — people the world files under the wrong categories — and his refusal to mock them for it.

The cats, meanwhile, deserve their mention. A car full of cats is either a disaster or a commitment, and in the logic of the novel it is both: an absurd burden the couple accepts without hesitation because it came with the life they chose. It is the book in miniature — love that takes on inconvenient things without weighing them first.

Where to Find It

Austin and Emily is available at Page & Palette and other local bookstores, as well as the major retail chains. The Fairhope-based Page & Palette has long been a hub for the city’s literary scene — hosting author events and championing Gulf Coast writers — and its shelves have tracked Hollon’s career from his early novels through the screen adaptations. For readers elsewhere, the major chains carry the title as well, making the novel an easy addition for anyone who has followed Hollon’s work or the film versions of his books.

For Baldwin County readers in particular, the release is a local event with national reach: a novelist who lives among them producing work that ends up on film, set against a career that has unfolded without Hollon ever leaving the Gulf Coast behind. Austin and Emily — improbable, funny and unexpectedly sincere — is the newest entry in that career, and it suggests the road from Baldwin County to the Walk of Fame runs through a car full of cats.

An Unlikely Pair, Precisely Drawn

What keeps a premise like this from collapsing into gimmick is character, and Hollon gives Austin and Emily enough interior life to carry the weight. Austin, at 347 pounds, has spent a lifetime being reduced to his size; his dry wit is the response of a man who decided long ago that if the world insists on treating him as a punchline, he will write his own material. His canned-ham devotion is rendered without apology — a small, specific appetite treated with the dignity of any great literary obsession.

Emily, by contrast, burns hot and immediate. Her short temper and simple worldview could have made her a caricature, but the novel treats her directness as its own kind of intelligence: she sees people plainly, without the social arithmetic everyone else performs, and she loves the same way. The meeting in the Tampa strip club — unglamorous, absurd, entirely right — works because both characters are at their most honest in places the respectable world writes off.

From there, the couple’s leap of faith is total. They fall hard for each other in the space of a moment, load the cats, and point the car west. The novel’s comedy comes from how completely unprepared they are for the journey in practical terms and how completely prepared they are in the only terms the book cares about.

The Modern-Day Oz

Hollon’s framing of Los Angeles as a modern-day Oz gives the novel its second movement. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, the destination the couple has fixed on, is a concrete slab with names in brass — fame made physical, happiness with an address. Like Oz, it turns out to be a place where seekers project their longings, and the journey there exposes what the seekers actually need. Austin and Emily arrive carrying a carful of cats and an absolute belief in each other, which proves to be the only currency that matters on the road.

The novel’s comic surface — the mishaps, the strangers, the logistics of traveling with that many cats — sits on top of a sincere argument: that lasting happiness is not found but built, pair by pair, by people who refuse the halfway measures. That belief, stated plainly in the book, is what elevates the material beyond a shaggy-dog road story. Hollon is arguing for conviction in an ironic age, and he does it with a straight face and a cast of characters no sensible person would invent.

Readers coming to Hollon through Barry Munday, the film adaptation of Life Is A Strange Place, will find the same sensibility here: ordinary people in extraordinary predicaments, treated with comedy and compassion in equal measure. Those who know The God File or The Point of Fracture will recognize the fascination with belief — what people hold onto when life gives them little to hold. Austin and Emily gathers both strains into a single, unlikely love story, told by one of Baldwin County’s most productive and quietly accomplished novelists.