Readers who enjoyed Flagg's bestseller, "Fried Green Tomatoes," will go wild over "Welcome to the World, Baby Girl." This is one of those novels where adjectives want to overflow the reviewer's pen and spill out words like "fantastic, marvelous, and even stupendous."
". . . Poor little old human beings they're jerked into this world without having any idea where they came from or what it is they are supposed to do, or how long they have to do it in. Or where they are gonna wind up after that. But bless their hearts, most of them wake up every morning and keep on trying to make some sense out of it. Why, you can't help but love them, can you? I just wonder why more of them aren't as crazy as betsy bugs." Aunt Elner, 1978
Aunt Elner is a character you have to love. She's 93 years young and remembers just about everything worth remembering about her hometown, Elmwood Springs, Missouri. She particularly remembers Baby Girl, or Dena Nordstrom, who is the daughter of the Nordstrom's son Eugene who was killed in WWII.
Flagg sweeps her readers from the gentler confines of the late 1940s small-town America to the gritty side of the 1970s New York media circus. First you visit Elmwood Springs, walk down Main street looking into the shop windows, and then you listen to Neighbor Dorothy's little Radio Show broadcast from her living room. The tall radio tower in Dorothy's backyard can be seen for miles and somehow made folks feel connected to the outside world.
"Elmwood Springs, is not perfect by any means but as far as little towns go it is about as near-perfect as you can get without having to get downright sentimental about it or making up a
bunch of lies."
After Eugene Nordstrom's death, his widow, a beautiful young woman named Marion Chapman Nordstrom (at least Marion is what she called herself) brought herself and Baby Girl to stay with the Missouri grandparents. Marion and Baby Girl, Dena by name, lived happily in Elmwood Springs until the day a foreign fellow appeared at the door one day. Everyone knew he wasn't from around Missouri because he and Marion spoke German to each other. Soon after that strange visit, Marion packed up her things and Baby Girl and took off for unknown parts.
Flagg jumps out of the bucolic environment into the life of Dena Nordstrom as a grown woman. Dena, the protagonist of this story, is an intelligent, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. She is the pride of her network and a woman whose future is full of promise. Her present, however, is loaded with complications, and her past marked by mystery.
The pace becomes hectic and the chapters short, as Flagg unwinds a story of intrigue combined with zany characters like Aunt Elner, Dena's cousins the Warrens, and sinister con men like Sidney Capello. I must not forget, Sookie, of Selma, Alabama, Dena's exuberant, southern belle college roommate who is everything Dena is not, or Dr. Gerry O'Malley.
Each chapter has a title that helps you keep up with the story as you zip back and forth from the 40s to the 70s and ultimately end up panting with your brain in a twist in 1987. Every slip back in time reveals another snippet of Dena's life as well as her mother's. By the end of the book you know everything worth knowing about this young woman who longs to go home again, not knowing where home or love is.
Flagg uses a few historical characters in her novel with exchanges that ring so true you'd swear the words were not the author's but the real life character's. In particular, the interview Dena does with Tennessee Williams felt so on target it was eerie.
I shivered when Tennessee says to the ambitious Dena, "Fame is like a shark with a thousand eyes, waiting to eat you, gobble you up. Eat and swim, eat and swim. Fame kills, baby. Fame is an uneasy place; people are either running toward it or running away from it but it's not a place where anyone can live comfortably. No one enjoys it."
Fannie Flagg has surpassed "Fried Green Tomatoes," with "Welcome to the World, Baby Girl." I highly recommend this funny, touching and constantly surprising novel.
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(Jones is a published writer & a literary critic for the
Tulsa World newspaper)
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