Depression-era family tale delights
By Sharyn Wizda Vane
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, March 30, 2003
If you thrill to the domestic nitty-gritty of life — what someone wore, ate or listened to — Austinite Karen Stolz’s new novel will pique your interest. If you’re a devotee of the idylls of a storybook prewar America, all the better.
If you’re a plot fanatic — well, you’re likely to be left wanting. Like Stolz’s 2000 hit debut, “World of Pies,” “Fanny and Sue” is less a novel than a series of interconnected set pieces, following the twins of the title through the adventures of their Depression-era childhood and teenage years. Told from the alternating perspectives of each girl, these stories evoke the same home-centered charms of small-town existence as “Pies,” despite being set in the big city of St. Louis: This is the kind of life in which Mom rolls biscuits each morning and the girls fashion handmade valentines.
Indeed, there’s a sweetness to “Fanny and Sue,” one that will be familiar to Stolz’s fans (even without the recipes that dotted “Pies”). Family dinners, sewing lessons and school dances are all rendered in loving detail, a paean to an imagined simpler time reminiscent of Fannie Flagg’s newest, “Standing in the Rainbow.” Even the family’s financial troubles during the depth of the Depression are tinted by a certain cinematic romance — the twins’ mother rolls those biscuits extra-thin to make extra for the men begging at the back door.
That’s not to say there isn’t hardship in Fanny’s and Sue’s lives. One of the strongest sections follows Sue to quarantine in the hospital because of scarlet fever. Here Stolz takes the time necessary to sketch a third-grader’s terror at having to leave her family, pausing to parse Sue’s inability to imagine six entire weeks away from her home. “I couldn’t believe this. What was six weeks? It was like six years, to me, in my mind and heart. And I hadn’t even gotten through one whole week yet.” At home, Sue’s absence makes Fanny realize her sister’s unusual talents: “I mean, I started to realize that Sue was smarter than me about some things, and it bothered me no end.”
Elsewhere, troubles are skittered over and forgotten: their mother’s miscarriage, a cousin’s bout with polio. These bumps in the road are dealt with so lightly that they don’t add the depth that would elevate “Fanny and Sue” beyond a sweet tale.
But the confectionlike charm of dipping into a world punctuated by Christmas made special simply by a breakfast plate of bacon is infectious in Stolz’ hands. OK, so “Fanny and Sue” won’t change your life. But it just might make for a delicious Sunday afternoon.
Sharyn Wizda Vane is the Statesman’s book editor.