Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
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| Author | Fannie Flagg |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 365 |
Can't Wait to Get to Heaven is a 2006 novel by Fannie Flagg. Based in the fictional town of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, it is a humorous look at Southern mores and small-town mentality in the context of death and the existence of an afterlife. Elner Shimfissle, the octogenarian protagonist, falls out of a tree while picking figs and is rushed to the hospital unconscious, where she is reported dead. The novel satirizes both the response of her neighbors down below—including the food they send for the funeral and the obituary written for a Southern newspaper—and the view from above, where Elner meets her dead sister, her hero Thomas Alva Edison, and God Himself: her former neighbor, Raymond, a modest, pipe-smoking divinity.
Elner Shimfissle, an octogenarian who doesn't know her own age since her sister Ida buried the family Bible to conceal hers, is known and liked by a large circle of friends and admirers. One morning she is picking figs in her tree when she is stung by wasps, falls off the ladder, and loses consciousness. She is rushed to the hospital in Kansas City, where she apparently dies. Back home, Elner's acquaintances tidy her house, feed her cat, and start preparing for her funeral. Elner, meanwhile, wakes up in her pitch-black hospital room and calls for assistance. Not receiving any, she goes out to the hallway and enters an elevator, which takes her straight "up." Her sister Ida greets her at Heaven's gates and then she is ushered upstairs to meet God and ask any questions she likes. Besides sporting such fanciful things as polka-dotted squirrels and unusually colored landscapes, Heaven also looks like her hometown, Elmwood Springs, about 50 years in the past. Elner meets God—her former neighbor Raymond, a modest, pipe-smoking divinity—and they discuss how he and his wife Dorothy created mankind and the current state of the world. Then Raymond sends Elner back down to Elmwood Springs, where she wakes up in her hospital bed and sets in motion another round of shocked neighbors who are incredulous that she's really alive. Elner lives a few more years after that and finally dies peacefully in her sleep, as she'd always wanted to. The novel closes with a series of recipes for the various dishes that Elner's neighbors made to send to her funeral.