Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
This is an in-progress review; I'm only halfway done with the book. It's the work of Fannie Flagg, who wrote the immensely popular Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe (the book that became the movie, whose screenplay she apparently also wrote). Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (exclamation point included, such an annoying title) is clearly one of her minor works.
I haven't got any affection for Dena, the main character, yet. The book may be set in the seventies, but it was written much later than that (2001), and I feel like Dena's particular brand of prickly, self-destructive commitment-phobe isn't as fresh as Flagg seems to think it is.
What's really been grating is the characters who occupy Dena's "cutthroat" world of television. Clearly, we're supposed to find them ruthless and sinister, but they all have this de-clawed quality, like a production of Glengarry Glen Ross that's been censored for twelve-year-olds to perform it. Probably the main problem is that Flagg seems to have limited herself to polite language (i.e., no swearing). "Whaddya mean by that, buster?" does not exactly send shivers down my spine.
I don't mind the "down home" characters from the South, and I quite liked the two psychiatrist characters, too, at first, but all the secondary characters have grown to share the same problem: they only discuss Dena. And we already established how boring she is.
Comments