The Persia Cafe
By Melany Neilson
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $23.95
ISBN 0312262191

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Young people often dream that their life's direction will come in a Big Moment, when their purpose is revealed and they make an escape down one road or another. For Fannie Bell, the anti-heroine of The Persia Café, her big moment is shared with history, as destiny comes to meet her in a small Southern town during the early days of the civil rights movement. The story is set in Persia, poised on the Mississippi River and "that split-second sliding between ripeness and rot."

Fannie's first memories are of copying recipes from the collection of cookbooks at the local library. By her early teens, it's clear that Fannie has a God-given talent with food. Commissions pour in for her decorated cakes, and she begins to test her culinary ability after hours in the kitchen of her aunt's diner, the Persia Cafe. Fannie serves, cleans and grows up in the cafe; eventually she's cooking all day at the "only place that served food to white folk in town," nurturing the good and the flawed with her smothered chicken and biscuits.

Fannie befriends Mattie, the cafe's African-American cook, who becomes her embittered culinary and moral conscience; and she falls in love with a wild Choctaw/Scottish man and gets married. Then she enters a cooking contest. These small and momentous events divide the story into its chapters: "The Wedding Cake," "The Entry," "Honorable Mention." Then comes "The Body," and the town is turned upside down.

Fannie's discovery of an interracial romance and its tragic outcome brings her Big Moment right to the cafe door. Her reaction is to cook more, feed the disenfranchised and develop an unexpected defiance.

As events unfold, Fannie discovers that the townspeople are not exactly who she knows them to be. She realizes that secrecy greases the social wheel; as Mattie tells her, "The truth is what happened. It ain't what comes out of folks' mouths."

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her memoir, Even Mississippi, Nelson turns to fiction in The Persia Café. She scatters extraordinarily rich, elliptical metaphors throughout her poetic South, a place of glory and prejudice, struggling to reconcile its contradictions.

Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville.