‘Heaven’ feel-good tribute to simple life
“Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven: A Novel”
by Fannie Flagg (Random House, 384 pages, $25.95)
The lessons in Fannie Flagg’s funny and utterly charming new novel are down-home simple but effective: Enjoy your time on Earth. Be nice. Eat cake. Remember you don’t have to be rich or famous to touch other lives in a profound way.
And take care that you don’t meet your Maker in a ratty old bathrobe, because wouldn’t you just die of embarrassment if you weren’t already dead?
Flagg honed her cheerful wisdom in the bright comic novels “Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!” and “Standing in the Rainbow” – which, like “Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven,” involve small-town Elmwood Springs, Mo., where Neighbor Dorothy’s living-room radio show once ruled the airwaves.
It’s the sort of town where, should you fall off a ladder after surprising a nest of wasps in your fig tree, word of the mishap travels so fast you’d almost expect someone to be there to catch you before you hit the ground.
The tumble happens to octogenarian Elner Shimfissle, although no one knows her age for sure, because her vain sister Ida buried the family Bible with its blunt roster of births, baptisms and departures in the yard years ago.
She wakes up in the hospital and decides to take a little nap before confronting her excitable niece Norma, who is sure to raise Cain about her being on the ladder in the first place. Instead, though, Elner finds herself in a strange, new place with a lot of familiar people.
Elner’s predicament prompts an existential crisis of sorts in Elmwood Springs. Suddenly everyone is wondering about the meaning of life and the secret to happiness – from poor Tot Whooten, owner of Tot’s Tell It Like It Is beauty parlor, who frets that the end of the world may come before she can collect Social Security, to ultra-religious Verbena Wheeler down at the Blue Ribbon Cleaners and Fluff and Fold Laundromat, who frowns at Elner’s “radical” questions about Adam and Eve: “She could trace the changes right back to the day Elner had gotten cable television, and had started watching the Discovery Channel.”
Despite its avid focus on mortality, “Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven” shares none of the darker themes of Flagg’s most memorable novel, “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe,” which touched on racism and spousal abuse in 1930s Alabama.
Although it, too, involves a secret crime, “Heaven” is a gentler book, a feel-good testament to the simple joys of life even in its most poignant.
Flagg can wring a grin from the worst cynic, whether she’s writing about Elner’s unabashed adoration of Thomas Edison – “She personally celebrated his birthday every year by turning on all her electrical appliances at once and leaving them on all day” – or Tot’s fears for her useless children: “If there was a fool within fifty miles, they had either married it or had numerous offspring with it. Tot had begged her children to please stop breeding.”
Even so, there are fine times ahead for Tot and Elner and almost everybody in Elmwood Springs. And Flagg suggests that we just might share them, too.