A funny thing happened on the way to heaven
Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven
By Fannie Flagg
Random House
Hardbound $25.95
By BILL DUNCAN
Anyone who has read Fannie Flagg’s previous books know they are in for some funny dialog and weird characters. How does she come up with the strange plots, the real life dialog and those wonderful characters?
"When I start a book," she said. "I never know what is going to happen next."
It was so when she wrote her newest book, "Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven," 359 pages of pure Fannie Flagg. In this book, she returns readers to Elmwood Springs, Mo. the setting for her 2002 novel, "Standing in the Rainbow."
She admits that because her style of writing is not knowing what comes next, her chief character, Elner Shimfissle surprised even her. She said she hated to finish the book.
The idea of the book, she said, came to her because she was thinking that despite all the things humans know, "there still remains one great mystery, one great universal question, what is life all about and where do we go from here? Life is so unpredictable it can change in just a second, which does make your wonder what it’s all about."
It changes right that quickly in the first pages of "Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven," when Elner, who is known in the community of Elmwood Springs, Missouri at "Aunt Elner," climbs a ladder to pick figs for her famous fig preserves and is stung by a swarm of wasps. She tumbles to the ground. Neighbors find her unconscious and thus the story begins.
Elner is rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Kansas City. Her nervous niece, Norma, arrives at the house just in time to see Elner loaded into the ambulance, dressed in what Norma feels is that hideous brown robe that is bound to embarass Norma, if not the whole town.
Norma and her husband, Macky follow the ambulance in their car but lose sight of the ambulance when Macky takes a shortcut and is stopped by a long freight train blocking the crossing.
Shortly after they arrive, the doctor tells them Elner is dead.
The story is told in a series of flashbacks of Elner’s life and how it involves everyone in Elmwood Springs.
Everybody is planning her funeral. Cathy, the editor of the local newspaper, plans the best obituary of her writing career for Elner, who paid of her college education when her family couldn’t.
Each person in the town has fond memories of Elner, an octogenarian who had in some way touched each life.
Flagg works each character to the fullest in quick, one or two page chapters told in touching and funny vignettes with all the Southern charm of her other books. For example, the main concern in the life of one character, Tot Whooten, who owns Tot’s Tell It Like It Is Beauty Shop, is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her Social Security. Some of the funniest lines are when Elner meets her late sister, Ida, after first taking an elevator and then climbing the stairs to heaven.
About 100 pages into the book, the reader is in for a surprise and the truth of Flagg’s statement that she writes without knowing what comes next. The message Elner’s neighbors discover is that heaven is right there in Elmwood Springs among their neighbors.
Flagg is a pseudonym for her real name, Patricia Neal. She was born in Birmingham, Ala. in interviews has said she is severely dyslexic and although from the age of 6, she wanted to be a writer, biut because of her handicap she was discouraged.
She became successful in a television career as a news anchor and later co-host for the Candid Camera show, where she began writing comedy sketches, but would never show the copy to others fearing they would discover she couldn’t spell.
It wasn’t until she was in her 30s, after winning a short story contest at a writer’s conference, that she had the courage to become a writer. Southern Living magazine wrote that Fannie Flagg "was put on this earth to write" and concluded that her "tales are as sweet and refreshing as iced tea on a summer day."
Readers of "Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven," will no doubt concur.
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times and writes a weekly column on the Thursday Opinion Page)