"Fat Woman" is a slim novel with a big heart and a sizable funnybone. Leon Rooke puts us inside the copious body of Ella Mae Hopkins … and we waddle with her through one traumatic day, sharing her secret worries and consolations, her routine travails, her battles of gastronomic will…. We share also her concern over a finger that is being choked gangrenous by her wedding ring and her curiosity as to why Edward, her husband, has begun nailing boards over the window of their bedroom. By novel's end there is resolution concerning the finger and the window—and that's the whole of the story. This admittedly sounds, in synopsis, like somniferous stuff; the small miracle about "Fat Woman" is that it remains entertaining despite its extreme simplicity of event.

One large reason for this is the richness and rhythms and humor of Southern country language, which Rooke has...