Home, Home on the Strange Lake Wobegon Days

By J.D. Reed

"When is he going to write a book about it?" The question has been asked for years in taprooms, diners and shopping malls all over the country. The reason: weekly doses of wry musings about mythical Lake Wobegon, Minn., on the public-radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion are not enough for many of the program's 2 million fans. They have been yearning for something more substantial.

The wait is over. Garrison Keillor, self-effacing fabulist, closet sociologist and "America's Tallest Radio Humorist," has written the history of "the little town that time forgot and that the decades cannot improve." His affectionate sketches provide a full granary of bemused narratives about favorite Wobegonians, including Father Emil, who blesses animals on the lawn of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church; the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian, which sprouts grass from an unusual place; and Angler Dr. Nute, a retired dentist who tells the sunfish, "Open wide . . . This may sting a little bit."

Keillor's fame arises from broadcasting such bucolic whimsy, but he is no literary novice. His humor has appeared in such magazines as the Atlantic and The New Yorker, and his stories about the upper Midwest were collected in the best-selling Happy to Be Here (1982). This time, in addition to raising questions about the nature of nostalgia, Keillor explores the confrontation between God-fearing parents and the children they send off to college.

He recognizes the ordinary without ridiculing it, but his ordinary is loony enough for any South American magic realist. The seat of Mist County, in an unmapped region northwest of Minneapolis, delights in eccentric folklore. The first white settlers are led by a Boston Unitarian called to convert the Indians with interpretive dance. She only captivates a beskinned and unbathed French trapper, with whom she has seven children. The failing local college - is finally abandoned after a bear kills a student, and the town's first Norwegian is a Union Army deserter whose descendants, the Sons of Knute, hold a yearly contest, starting on Groundhog Day, where you bet on the day and hour a 1949 Ford will sink through the ice and into the lake. "Left to our own devices," writes Keillor, "we Wobegonians go straight for the small potatoes."

Far from an ideal of Norman Rockwell hominess, Lake Wobegon reverberates with terror and finalities. Lonely Norwegians with whisky bottles lie down on their family graves in Our Prairie Home Cemetery to talk to the dead about the old country. Keillor's folk confront mainstream America with beer and trembling. They are still wagging their heads and clucking their tongues over Father Emil's summer replacement. Golfing Father Frank proclaims of his martini at a backyard party, "Dry. Mmmmm. What did you do? Just think about vermouth, for Christ's sake?"

Dour, deliberate and repressed residents, both Lutheran and Roman Catholic, suffer dangerous guilt complexes. Just as the middle Olson boy reaches out to examine the medallion between the breasts of a sultry waitress from Mom and Dad's Cafe, Lake Wobegon's four-story grain elevator explodes, showering the town with chunks of timber.

The narrator of these sometimes vitriolic vignettes is Gary Keillor, a tall, skinny kid with wire-rim glasses. (The budding author changed his name to Garrison at age 13 because he wanted a sophisticated pseudonym.) His family belongs to a Fundamentalist sect that forbids dancing, drinking, movies, TV and overuse of the personal pronoun. Gary dreams early and often of adventure and escape. He and his friends play Senator Joe McCarthy routing Commies. He practices kissing on his thumb and forefinger in case Girlfriend Dorene gives him that "smoky Minneapolis look." In the best Lutheran tradition, a fellow escapee pens a manifesto, 95 Theses 95, to his parents and his town. Sample indictment: "I find it very hard to whoop it up, hail a pal, split a gut, cut a rug, have a ball . . . I'm your boy all right."

So is Keillor. After marriage and fatherhood, an older, mellower Gary moves back to a farm. Lost in a blizzard, he is saved by seeing the dark shape of a neighbor's house. "Some luck," he concludes, "lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known."

Lake Wobegon Days also gets lost in the drift at times. The problem: Keillor's fondness for his rural creations sidetracks a fine story about growing up, surviving fame and accepting life. But there may be a certain country slyness in the style. Keillor's aesthetic, after all, echoes Lake Wobegon's motto: "We are what we are." Like Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, this is Gary Keillor's Pretty Good Book. And that ought to be just plain good enough for the Wobegonians of the world.