There's no better time to pick up a great read than crisp fall nights. Here's the low down on Fannie Flagg's hit.
Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven
Fannie Flagg
Random House, 2006 $24.95 363 pages
If you like your green tomatoes fried and your ice tea Southern sweet, here’s another gem from Fannie Flagg for your must read list. If you’ve ever said, “I feel like I died and went to heaven,” Elner Shimfissle will prove you haven't a clue. Through her eyes, the classic vision of angels sitting on clouds and strumming harps has nothing to do with the reality behind the pearly gates.
Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, Flagg’s 2006 homespun epic, made me wish I knew the women under dryers at Tot’s Tell It Like It Is Beauty Shop. I’d like to have Sunday supper with Elner, our star, Verbena, who thinks the Hing Doag family down the block could be part of a terrorist sleeper cell, and Macky – the strong male always ready to show support for his women folk. They could be counted on, I’m sure, to deliver guileless charm and unstudied forthrightness typical of Flagg’s fictional people.
Fanny Flagg began as a staff writer for Candid Camera in 1960. From there, she acted in movies like Five Easy Pieces and Best Little Whore House, appeared on numerous television shows like Match Game, and turned her pen to fiction in the 1980s. Her books have earned her accolades, millions of fans and academy awards.
This story’s opening begs to be read again and again. Elner, an old woman of indeterminate age, heads out to her fig tree to fetch some fruit for a friend. She’s been told countless times by family members who adore her that climbing a ladder is not safe for a woman of her age. But Elner is her own woman. Disregard the well meaning folk around her, up the ladder she goes. We next encounter her in the local hospital, comatose. Or is she?
Family members are frantic. Neighbors scramble to do the neighborly thing when rumors fly that Elner has passed. Even the local radio show gets into the act. What's going on, who's alive and who's dead?
No one, including us readers, knows exactly what has happened to Elner. Is she among the living or has she gone to meet her maker, and who is her maker, anyway? Is she in a coma? What you’ve got here is a comedy -- of errors -- and a mystery that unfolds in its own good time.
“Can’t Wait…” is packed, as you would expect, with morals, messages and homespun wisdom always tempered with a healthy dose of laugh-out-loud or dry wit. Take for example, the moment when Elner is about to steer a young man gone astray onto the right path for life. She moves to show him where life has blessed him (don’t we all tend to do that to those less fortunate?)
As he bemoans the fact that he has nothing, she begins her homily – “You have something no body else on the entire earth has except you.”
Before she can specify, he rejoins, “What? A daddy that’s a no-good bastard from hell?”
The story reads well -- it’s fun. You get lost in the characters, come up for air after a while, and realize you’re reading a novel, not living in a country hamlet populated by eccentric lovables.
Mysteries abound. Why doesn’t anyone know Elner’s age? Where’s the family bible that disappeared years ago? Why is there a gun in Elner’s laundry? And the most myterious of all, what's life all about and where do we go from here? Read on – it’ll all unfold and you’ll love the solutions.
I got bogged down with preachier sections like a diatribe on the ills of our medical insurance system and on hospital evils. I suppose Flagg feels she’s earned the right to comment socially. She probably has, but the blatant form is a turn-off for me. Here, it’s brief, in the scheme of things, and not too distracting, but I could have done without.
Overall, I enjoyed the journey, the local color and sense of place. Nobody does sense of place better than Flagg when she’s writing on those venues that have been part of her life. Few other writers create characters so darned familiar to all of us. And this time, there’s a bonus – the book is filled with settings that include homemade, down-home food. From Irene Goodnight’s Funeral Casserole to a very heavenly cake, the appendix of the book generously provides the recipes for every dish.
I expect to see a movie come out of this – her books lend themselves excellently to Hollywood interpretation. But the movie version will always leave out bits that add flesh to bone and color the landscape with such brilliance. If you’ve read other Flagg books, you’ll find this familiar, yet intriguing. Her embedded mysteries are always a hoot. If you haven’t read her before, this is a good place to start.
More by Fannie Flagg:
A Redbird Christmas
Daisy Fay and the mIracle Man
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Standing in the Rainbow
