In a 2021 interview, author and historian Wesley Brown paraphrases Flannery O’Connor as saying that one of the obligations of fiction is to study what human beings lack. Brown’s slim new novel circles this idea of what is lacking in human nature. He begins with an enigmatic epigraph attributed to O’Connor in the first pages of his novel, Looking for Frank Wills:
Where you came from is gone.
Where you thought you were going to was never there.
And where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.
Restlessness is a constant for Brown’s protagonist, Frank Wills. In this inventive and formally daring work of historical fiction, Frank is uniquely guilty of being restive, unsatisfied, and at the same time unable or unwilling to articulate that experience of unease. Voicelessness equates with darkness and invisibility. As one character asks, “Didn’t [MLK] say a riot is the voice of the unheard?” Looking for Frank Wills is introspective, searching, and interrogative of prevailing cultural narratives, particularly racial mythologizing, as well as the machismo that we might describe as barbershop masculinity. Using first-person narration from the perspective of small-town barber Wayne Beasley, Brown challenges mass media messages that painted a false or incomplete picture of one of the forgotten heroes of the Watergate era, Frank Wills.
Our narrator, Wayne Beasley, is proprietor of the Clip and Trim barbershop. Wayne is a man of few words who, by nature of his position, often finds himself at the center of civic discourse in North Augusta, South Carolina, during the tumultuous early ’70s. “I speak very little,” he confides in us, “and hear what my customers have to say, which is far less interesting than what’s hidden in what they don’t say.” Beasley is a “fly on the wall” narrator like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, but unlike Carraway, anger and indignation simmer behind the barber’s calm veneer. He attempts to stay out of political debates and the affairs of his loudmouth customers. Wayne is largely successful, with the exception of the soft-spoken Frank Wills, a fatherless child whom the barber takes under his wing. When Frank is rejected as 4-F by the military, Wayne tries unsuccessfully to mentor the young man. They have a falling-out, and Wayne watches powerlessly as Frank drifts away from the barber shop, his resigned mother, and North Augusta altogether. He settles in Washington, D.C., and, after a stint as a janitor at a jazz club, lands a job as a security guard on the night shift at the Watergate Hotel. The job proves life changing. One night, Frank notices unusual activity and calls the police, who arrive at the hotel and arrest a group of men who will become known as the Watergate burglars, sparking a long chain of events that eventually leads to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Frank appears in the paper and suddenly becomes a national sensation—a heroic everyman who attracts the fascination of a public hungry for political scandal.
The internal battle at the center of the story is Frank’s ambivalence toward media attention—he feels both overwhelmed and secretly thrilled by it. But time and again, in front of news cameras and interlocutors on the street, Frank struggles to find his voice. He becomes frustrated and disappointed by his failure to satisfy the gossip-hungry media and the public. He develops a friendship with a photojournalist, Louvenia Pope, who profiles him for Ebony magazine, and through her subsequent friendship with Frank’s mother, Louvenia shares updates on Frank’s life that he is unwilling to share himself. Franks’s mother, Missus Wills, and Wayne learn from Louvenia that Frank has become a successful projectionist in cinemas around D.C. and even agreed to act in a movie about Watergate. But, whereas the real Frank Wills expressed regret for his role in Watergate because of its negative impacts on his life, Wesley Brown’s version of Frank looks back on it with acceptance.
Brown has taken on a challenging subject. The main beats of his story are based on documented, historical events. There really was a Frank Wills, and he really was celebrated in the press for discovering the Watergate break-in. But more fundamentally, Brown has chosen to celebrate and complicate Frank Wills, and the unsung heroes in Frank’s life, in his own way by interrogating the one-dimensional perspectives propagated in the media and by humanizing Frank, Wayne, Frank’s mother, and the community they came from. In this sense, Brown has engaged in a humanistic as well as a political project, reaching back in time to enrich and deepen a period of racial and social upheaval framed by Emmett Till, Vietnam, Nixon, and the assassination of MLK. The result is a fascinating and coherent picture of a three-dimensional man with contradictory impulses: one minute wanting fame, the next privacy, or one minute projecting old-fashioned masculinity, the next vulnerability.
In terms of form, the author isn’t afraid to experiment. Whole passages are written in italics, indicating imagined monologues, like the diatribes of outspoken men in the Clip and Trim barber shop, or simply asides that Brown may have chosen to include for the purposes of voice and setting, rather than plot. For example, Wayne makes some humorous digressions around the latest hair styles. Brown also uses italics at the end of the novel to designate a letter from Frank to Louvenia that displays a level of confidence and clarity that had eluded him until that point:
It was only after leaving North Augusta that I began to realize what [Wayne] had done for me. I’m learning to bide my time until I have something to say that’s coming from me and not be at the mercy of whatever words are coming at me.
Curious readers who dig into the historical record will find that some pieces of Looking for Frank Wills are factual while others have grown or changed by Brown’s design. The Ebony story was actually a 1973 Jet magazine article written by its D.C. bureau chief, Simeon Booker. It begins, “Frank Wills is a Black man who always has been jinxed by one thing or another.” But Wills really did play himself in a 1976 film adaptation of All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
More digging will reveal that the flood of writings about Watergate often got Frank’s name and job title wrong. In that context, we may begin to understand what attracted Wesley Brown in the first place to this forgotten, blue-collar hero—the perpetuation of racist attitudes that resulted in omission and misrepresentation, or more tellingly, through Wesley Brown’s eyes, invisibility and voicelessness. The seed of that inspiration was evidently fruitful. It has resulted in a more respectful, intellectually curious, and hopeful reimagination of Frank Wills’ life, one in which Frank finds his own voice and, coincidentally enough, so does Wesley Brown.
[Wesley Brown will make an appearance to discuss Looking for Frank Wills at Call & Response Books in Chicago on Wednesday, May 13.]
FICTION
Looking for Frank Wills
By Wesley Brown
McSweeney’s
Published May 5, 2026
