Fran: N is for Notaro

I recently finished Laurie Notaro's book, there's a (slight) chance i might be going to hell. Subtitled "a novel of sewer pipes, pageant queens, and big trouble", it's a comic novel in the vein of Jane Smiley's Moo (which I have read and enjoyed) and Jill Conner Browne's Sweet Potato Queens books (which I have only glanced at but have often picked up and set down in that maybe kind of way).  Very chick-lit in a Christopher Moore way.

The main character, Maye, follows her husband from Phoenix to his new job at a small liberal arts college in Washington state.  There she looks for friendship of fun friends to cure her loneliness.  But the tight-knit town, with its various demographic groups (old-time seniors who've lived in the tiny town forever, hippie new agers, college faculty), doesn't seem to have a space for her.  Hence the desire to run for Sewer Pipe Queen, in a desperate attempt to bust into the small-town scene.  The secrets of the town, stemming from arsons years before that destroyed the pipe plant, come out in the process and change the nature of the town (and Maye), such that they can have a place for each other.

While others loved this book, I was charmed only enough to keep reading.  The scenes are over-the-top scenarios constructed to be outrageous.  There are many flat characters, used for comic scenarios but without depth; Notaro wants us to believe in Maye's depth (and the depth of the former Sewer Pipe Queen, Ruby) but she constantly brings us into situations that are funny but not transformative/revelatory.  The writing often forces us to find it funny: "Crawford Lake Road was not paved, and not only was it a bumpy dirt road, it was full of potholes that looked more like spots where meteors had bounced off the face of the earth the way a basketball inevitably rebounds off the head of the fat girl in freshman gym class."

I could see picking up another but I suspect that I would be thinking of the annoying bits more than the bits I enjoyed.  I might pick up a non-fiction from her journalism days--I suspect that the writing would be more subtle and better shaped.