Southern Comforts

Tuck in your napkins, because Fannie Flagg has served us up another big, juicy Middle American apple pie of a book, sometimes tart but mostly sweet.

Fans of Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” and “Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!” are going to enjoy this one too.

“Standing in the Rainbow” covers the period from 1946 to the millennium. Its vantage point is Elmwood Springs, Mo., with its one-block downtown and surrounding farms, woods and swimming holes. The first half of the novel focuses on the Smith family--easygoing pharmacist Doc and his wife, Dorothy (whose “Neighbor Dorothy” radio show, broadcast from her living room via a backyard transmission tower, is a lifeline for rural women in five states), their pretty daughter, Anna Lee, and their rambunctious 10-year-old son, Bobby.

Theirs is a world of senior proms and bubble-gum-blowing contests, of eccentric but well-meaning relatives, of romance that mostly runs smooth and childhoods that segue neatly into responsible adulthood. It’s a world that admits tragedy (an earlier Smith child died) and deprivation (the Smiths’ boarder, short-order cook Jimmy Head, lost a leg in World War II and never will find love), but even its dark side is sugar-coated.

In this sense, Flagg’s fiction deviates from the tradition it draws on, which began with Mark Twain and Booth Tarkington and includes such recent novels as Thomas Berger’s “The Feud” and Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days.” All of these authors feign a naive voice to deliver sophisticated insights. They satirize an insular, self-satisfied culture that, on another level, they sympathize with. The tension between satire and sympathy is what gives their stories bite.

Flagg, on the other hand, is an out-and-out sympathizer. The satire in “Standing in the Rainbow” is a diversion, meant not to question or diminish Missourians but to make them more lovable. Flagg’s aim, in fact, is to defend white Middle America from the coastal elites that would dismiss it as fly-over territory and its people as rubes. Like country-born TV star Dena Nordstrom in “Baby Girl,” characters in this novel prove able to compete with anyone.

Foremost among them is Hamm Sparks, a tractor salesman who rises to become governor of Missouri on nothing more than energy, nerve, native shrewdness and a belief that the state’s little people need a champion. Pushy, ambitious people such as Sparks often fare poorly at the hands of novelists, and it’s one of Flagg’s charms that she shows his admirable side, just as she reminds us of small towns’ forgotten virtues.

During World War II, for instance, soldiers on troop trains passing through Elmwood Springs, “scared young boys trying to be brave ... wrote their names and addresses on pieces of paper and threw them out the train windows, hoping to get some girl to write to them. At the end of the war Elmwood Springs prided itself on the fact that not one boy ... had ever gone without an answer.” But it’s one thing to demand respect for heartland folks and their beliefs, something else to insist that those beliefs should be the measure of all things. It’s a fine line, and Flagg sometimes crosses it.

As the Smiths age and grow less interesting, Sparks takes over the second half of the novel. He marries Betty Raye Oatman, a shy girl who has stayed with the Smiths after tiring of her frenetic life on the road with the Oatman Family Gospel Singers. With Sparks, though, she’s back in the unwanted limelight as he battles state Democratic Party bosses, has an affair with glamorous Kansas City arts maven Vita Green, runs for president in 1968 and mysteriously vanishes.

Sparks gives a speech at UC Berkeley at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests. He is treated shabbily, to be sure--pelted with fruit and shouted down as faculty members look on, smirking. But there is no acknowledgment that the student protesters might have a point, or that they are anything more than “loonies” or “pig ignorant.” Or traitors.

Sparks’ speech, which we are supposed to admire, is warmed-over George Wallace--without the racism, but otherwise word-perfect in its appeals to Silent Majority resentment of “subversive ideas,” “pea-headed, lily-livered college professors” and “mama’s boys who let the others do the fighting for them,” all of which are blamed for making “bright and shining true-blue America ... begin to tarnish, tear and fall apart at the seams.”