Returning to a Past Touched by Scandal

In 1948, Elmwood Springs, Mo., is like a thousand other small towns. Downtown is only a block long. There’s a Rexall drugstore at one end and a Masonic Hall on the other.

Twenty-five years later, not much has changed--or so it seems to Dena Nordstrom, the “Baby Girl” born in Elmwood Springs who grew up to be America’s favorite blond TV gal. When a bleeding ulcer sends Dena back to the Midwest to recover, the mystery of her past begins to unfold.

“Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!” (Random House, 1998) is in many ways “as corny as Kansas in August,” but author Fannie Flagg takes Dena back to New York City often enough to keep the tale from turning into a bad country song.

Flagg, whose real name is Patricia Neal, was a comedian and actress with credits including “Candid Camera” and “The New Dick Van Dyke Show.” But she is most famous as the woman who, despite her dyslexia, wrote “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe.” Her latest novel is not a sequel to that bestseller (which was turned into an award-winning movie) but shares much of its down-home charm.

Most of her folksy characters are offbeat, but (with the occasional exception of Baby Girl herself), they’re folks you wouldn’t mind sittin’ a spell with. Flagg has a gift for description, introducing Dena’s quirky Aunt Elner, for example, as a woman who “always smelled like a wedding cake” and moves in a cloud of Cashmere bouquet dusting powder.

When Flagg writes about those who people Dena’s high-powered New York life, the words are equally vivid. Flagg describes Dena’s high-powered, hardhearted network boss, for example, as “a fat, bald guy who looks exactly like a big sea bass in a white shirt.”

Dena’s cozy past, with its memories of grape Kool-Aid and sweetheart porch swings, harbors a deep, dark secret. And as Baby Girl puts on her reporter’s hat to piece together the scandal that caused her mother to flee Elmwood Springs decades before, the story tightens up.

And something Aunt Elner says in one of the early chapters assumes a particular poignancy by the book’s end:

“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’re 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?”