Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! FROM THE PUBLISHER
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is the funny, serious, and compelling new novel by Fannie Flagg, author of the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (and prize-winning co-writer of the classic movie).
Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.
SYNOPSIS
Fannie Flagg's utterly charming Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe has delighted millions of readers. Now, with her long-awaited new novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Flagg returns with the story of Dena Nordstrom, a rising network TV anchorwoman in '70s Manhattan, whose future is full of promise, whose present is rich with complications, and whose past is clouded by mystery.
FROM THE CRITICS
Robert Plunket
I found the whole thing rather enjoyable....[Flagg] keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along... —New York Times Book Review
Jill Smolowe - Time
...utterly irresistible...fast-paced.
Laura Jamison - People
Flagg's. . .faith in the healing power of small towns and family are refreshing.
Book Magazine
Southern-Fried PlatitudesIn my own experience, people in small towns steal other people's property, spouses and children. They commit arson, beat their wives and children, shoot at each other, do drugs and terrorize people who are different. People in the city, on the other hand, are usually too busy to misbehave too badly.
The opposite is the case in the world of Fannie Flagg (whom you may know from such TV programs as the Gong Show and Match Game). In her new novel Welcome to the World, Baby Girl, the bad people are found in the city. Specifically, 1970s New York City, where brittle protagonist Deena Nordstrom reigns as the popular host of TV's highest-rated morning news program and does daily battle with a ratings-mad boss to retain her journalistic scruples.
But Deena, the Baby Girl of the title, also has a tendency to tie one on and bed unsuitable men (well, maybe; she also tends to black out and forget the details). Nevertheless, she's an ace interviewer who pulls in good ratings and a good salary-until an evil gossip-monger named Sidney Capello threatens to take it all away by revealing a Terrible Secret about the mother who abandoned Deena 15 years earlier.
Like her 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Flagg's Baby Girl jumps back and forth in time and place. It opens with a so-idyllic-as-to-seem-satirical scene in 1940s Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where a woman named Neighbor Dorothy-the antithesis of Howard Stern-hosts a sickeningly sweet radio show in the front room of her house. During the half-hour program, a parade of simple-but-good local oddballs like Beatrice the blind songbirdtake their turns at the mike, and nary a negative word is aired.
Cut back to New York, where Deena-the friendless, hung-over career girl-is unhappy, but doesn't know why. After collapsing from ex-haustion, she finds herself on the couch of a psychiatrist (an African-American woman in a wheelchair). Despite intense therapy, which we get to witness, the emotionally vacant Deena remains enigmatic-even to herself-until the last part of the book, when it turns out that she's actually rather boring. Far more impressive a character is her old college roommate Sookie, a bubbly, born-again Southern belle with a keen mind and a sharp tongue. But there's far too little of her in the book.
Flagg does not skimp on plot. During her quest, Deena meets her hero, Tennessee Williams, and the two have a drunken heart-to-heart. In one gory scene, Deena almost dies from a bleeding ulcer. She decides to convalesce in Elmwood Springs, where she lived for the first four years of her life and has some distant relatives. There, she makes the decision to find out the truth about her mother and enlists the aid of another (former) shrink, an insufferably romantic geek named Gerry O'Malley.
They eventually track down the Terrible Secret, which turns out to be not-that-terrible. (Stop reading here if you don't want to know what it is.) It turns out that her mother was (gasp!) a light-skinned black woman who spent most of her life passing for white and dragging her daughter from town to town to avoid detection. Deena's research also uncovers a musician uncle whose career and life were ruined by an African-American version of Sidney Capello.
Flagg does a fine job of creating the racist world Deena's mother tried to protect her from, but she deftly avoids answering the question of how the people of the idyllic pre-civil rights Elmwood Springs have reacted to her secret. She addresses the question indirectly by having one of Deena's relatives react with indifference, another with disbelief ("Don't you think somebody would have noticed if Gene had married a colored girl?"). Great Aunt Elner, who goes back to the days of Neighbor Dorothy, adds, "Well, whatever she was, she was a pretty thing. Isn't that what they say? That black is beautiful . . . And I'll tell you another thing, they ought to put Amos and Andy back on the radio."
Ultimately, the experience of reading Baby Girl is much like eating a chocolate éclair (or, if you prefer, like having mediocre sex). In other words, you have to go through a lot of air and fat before you get to the custard. Not that the book isn't highly readable-it is, much like the back of a cereal box is readable. It's also exasperating, and in the end, the episodic nature and often-ponderous dialogue make it seem more like watching a TV movie than reading a novel. —Cara Jepsen
Publishers Weekly
Because so much of Flagg's third novel takes place in the 1970s media-celebrity echelons of New York City, it doesn't offer the regional and historical color and texture of its predecessor, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Instead, Flagg's achievement here lies in a well-choreographed story of loyalty and survival that zigzags deftly across the post-war years, panning in on the never-changing decency of Elmwood Springs, Mo., then pulling back to watch national TV news devolve into sensationalism--all the while drawing us into the compelling life of Dena Nordstrom. Star of America's most popular morning news show, Dena shuts herself down and shuts men out for painful reasons that are unknown even to her. Only after the stress of ambush- and sound-byte journalism brings on a hemorrhaging ulcer does Dena slowly unearth the scandal that, when Dena was four, drove her mother from Elmwood Springs, hometown of the war hero father that Dena never knew. That her mother's nemesis is a newspaper gossipmonger is nicely ironic, although her mother's secret shame seems slightly larger than life. In contrast, Dena's college friend Sookie and great aunt Elner are reminders of how well Flagg can cook up memorable women from the most down-to-earth ingredients, while a cameo by Tennessee Williams is uncannily true to life. Fans may be sorry at first to leave Elmwood Springs for the big city, but even the most reluctant will get wrapped up in Dena's search for the truth about her family and her past.Read all 11 "From The Critics" >
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