By Elizabeth Redhead Kriston
Like most women from my time, I loved the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. I was astonished to learn that it was written by the comedic actress Fannie Flagg. I knew her from her antics on the Match Game. How could this same silly woman have written such an insightful and heart-wrenching novel?
Then I forgot about her.
One day I was perusing a used book sale and found another novel written by Fannie Flagg and I thought, “She wrote more than one book?” I paid my 50 cents and took the book home tucking into my need to read bookshelf. Years later I plucked it from the shelf and read it. I really enjoyed the book, though I cannot recall which of her many novels it was.
I find myself turning to Flagg’s books over and over especially after reading a very heavy novel. Her light-hearted and whimsical books are the perfect anecdote for the gloom and doom of many of the historical fiction books I love to read.
After finishing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I desperately needed a Flagg novel to put me on an even keel. The Whole Town is Talking, Flagg’s most recent novel, called out to me from my library and I downloaded the MP3 audio version to my Overdrive app. I spent the next week being cheerfully entertained my Flagg’s words read by Kimberly Farr.
This novel which they say was inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with which I am not familiar, takes the reader on a generational journey as a small town in Missouri is made and then grown and then lost over generations.
We follow a family of Swedish immigrants evolve as they inhabit a small farming community and build Elm Wood Springs from nothing. This town’s first major project was the cemetery. This cemetery becomes the heart and soul of the town as one by one the founders and then their descendants begin to fill the plots.
This is not a gloom and doom book. Each person lives a full life and dies when it is “their time” as Flagg’s characters insightfully suppose. In this town, ordinary people live mostly ordinary lives. We get to know them and watch them grow and change and encounter day to day things. Somehow, Flagg is able to highlight unusual happenings, coincidences and quirky personalities to make this book charming and interesting.
Elner, a good-hearted, animal loving, fig jam making farmers wife has many quirks. Her good-hearted friendliness means she welcomes all types to her farm. Lost travelers happen upon her land and she welcomes them all preparing them a hearty meal and sending them off with a jar of her jam made from her fig tree.
Unbeknownst to her, she fed Bonnie and Clyde breakfast when they got lost. Another time she entertained a future president and his wife. Both of these chance encounters weave there way into the storyline of this whimsical novel.
Flagg leaves no twist unturned or loose end untied. Everything she writes eventually leads to something else. Even the cemetery built in the very beginning serves a major role in the lives of the Elmwood Springs residents.
I won’t’ give it all away.
Flagg has a knack for making the ordinary fun and interesting. Her books are not dark and twisty. She even manages to make potentially bad things feel conventional. She keeps the overdone crisis to a minimum.
When I need a drama free, smart and funny book, I always turn to Flagg. She makes even the gloomiest of days seem sunny. I definitely need more sun
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