Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (Magill Book Reviews)

December 15, 1985, is Evelyn Couch’s lucky day: Seeking solitude in which to consume her hoarded candy bars, she chances to meet Mrs. Cleo Threadgoode and becomes enthralled by her nonstop stories of Whistle Stop, Alabama. Virginia Threadgoode (Ninny to her friends) married in the 1920’s into a large family in this very small town; thus she knows everyone’s stories, including the ones about the murder. The murder story is not the only one that brings Evelyn back each week with Almond Joys, Sno Balls, or Raisinettes to share. There is Smokey Lonesome the hobo, Artis Peavey the Slagtown dude, the Ku Klux Klan, wife beating, bureaucracy circumvented, and Miss Fancy the Elephant. Ninny’s stories of the Great Depression somehow lead Evelyn out of her own suicidal depression; in particular, the life of Idgie Threadgoode, coowner of the cafe, poker player, yarn spinner, and bee charmer, works upon Evelyn. These are stories of wisdom hard-won, calamities overcome, love enduring.

Besides creating a thorougly entertaining world, Fannie Flagg makes some sense of the last eighty years of American experience, making the controversies of the 1980’s seem no less thorny, but more human and manageable, in the light of the 1930’s. The complexity of mixed time and shifting narrative perspective Flagg handles with the ease of a veteran writer: The anecdotes and vignettes that make up FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE alternate between time present and time past, and as they do so, they reveal an abiding zest and warmth that survive the ravages of time, rather like Sipsey’s recipes, which are preserved in the last pages. Some of the brightest segments--and critical to the themes, flavor, and unity of the novel--are the brief installments of THE WEEMS WEEKLY: “Cafe Opens,” June 12, 1929, and “Hard to Say Goodbye,” June 25, 1969, bracket four decades of ordinary and extraordinary local news such as “Meteorite Hits Whistle Stop Residence,” “Religious Sewing Machines a Fraud,” and “Man Falls in Lacquer”—all authentic American humor.

Suggested Readings

Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg. Publishers Weekly 232 (August 28, 1987): 64.