Fannie Flagg: Standing In The Rainbow

By MARGIE THOMSON

A few years ago I interviewed Fannie Flagg and was smitten. Such warmth, such generosity of spirit - she's like a sweet, warm corncake, and I felt she was my best friend. She said, "Tell me about your kids", and sent us a photo of herself, signed. She even said, "Come and visit if you're ever in the neighbourhood", just like her books.

She has made a name for herself with sprawling, feel-good fiction - Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! - filled with humour and characters who are the essence of what America likes to believe about itself - kind, neighbourly, with strong family values.

They are almost satires, except that there's too much warmth, and Flagg is too damn nice to manipulate her characters in such a point-scoring way. Instead, her stories are clever and comic and strive to show how history moves even among the people of tiny towns in the most out-of-the-way places.

From the 1920s, small-town radio stations used local homemakers as hostesses for chatty programme segments. These women's voices would reach out across the prairies, into the kitchens of the most isolated farmhouses, bringing friendship and a sense of community.

Neighbour Dorothy - who readers may remember as a bit-character in Welcome to the World - is one of these, running her daily half-hour show "from that little white house just around the corner from wherever you are" in fictional Elmwood Springs, Missouri.

She is helped by her mother-in-law who inserts witty musical phrases on the organ (show's theme: On the Sunny Side of the Street), and singer Beatrice, the Little Blind Songbird.

The story opens in the 1940s and Dorothy has two children, teenage Anna Lee and Bobby, a 10-year-old tearaway whose every exploit and door-slam is related to Dorothy's thousands of listeners across several rural states.

The novel ends 500 pages later, in today's world of Wal Mart, McDonald's and gated retirement villages with names such as Leisureland, which means Flagg has set herself a huge task - a depiction of half a century of incredible social change.

Consequently, the pacing is a little uneven, sometimes rushing forward too quickly or meandering too whimsically, losing itself in pleasant inconsequence. I was getting rather bored until the Oatman Family Southern Gospel Singers turned up, with their painfully shy daughter Betty Rae, and then it's as if Flagg really finds her story.

Hamm Sparks also arrives, a slick, unstoppable tractor salesman who has a ferocious political ambition, and enough local supporters - including a wealthy gay mortician - to carry him all the way to the state governorship.

Along the way there's enough human drama - love, loss, thwarted dreams, happy endings and even a gangland killing - to keep the tongues of Elmwood Springs wagging happily, and readers turning the pages.

Flagg has a tremendous sense of social irony - the report of the local council meeting where members are trying to come up with a theme for their flagging town centre is hilarious and awful. So too is the scene where large gospel singer Minnie Oatman, whose daughter has become governor of Missouri, meets and empathises with the Queen Mother whose "girl turned out to be a queen".

But she runs deep, and passages where her older characters wind up beached in the modern world, grieving for what they have lost, are lyrical and moving.

One suspects that the world they have lost, though, was never quite as good and decent as they thought. Still, that's Flagg's world, and it's a pretty nice place to visit.

* Chatto & Windus

$34.95