As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently read Fannie Flagg’s novel Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven for my library book club. Although I read Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe a few years back and enjoyed it, I had no desire to read anything further by her, suspecting that her other books would be a bit overly-sentimental for my taste. And boy, was I right – at least about this one. I’d put off reading it til just a few days before the book club (my usual modus operandi for book club books) and was able to breeze through it in about a day and a half. Admittedly, this was because I didn’t care enough about the characters or what was happening to them to slow down and absorb the story.  Elner Shimfissle is an elderly woman living on her own in Missouri, who one day falls from a ladder while out picking figs in her garden, dies, and goes on a visit to heaven. Back home, her family and friends are grieving her loss as they contemplate how Elner affected their lives and the way she lived her own. Elner, meanwhile, is having a conversation with God over some heavenly pie.

Some critical reviews have claimed the book to contain “laugh-out-loud hilarity” but I can’t say it tickled my funny bone. Elner and the rest – even God – are cookie-cutter figures rather than full-dimensional characters who live in a happily-ever-after existence, untroubled by the realities of life. Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven is saccharine and simplistic, as though Miss Julia paid a visit to The Shack . I’m sure there are people who love this book (as evidenced by some of my book club members), but I’m not one of them.

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