The Ghosts of Studio B

By John Skow

WLT: A RADIO ROMANCE

by Garrison Keillor

Viking; 401 pages; $21.95

When Garrison Keillor reinvented the radio variety show some years ago with his Prairie Home Companion program Saturday evenings on public radio, the driving emotional force was a shameless, moony nostalgia for the never-was. But misty reminiscence taken straight out of the bottle is saccharine. What gives Keillor's wamblings about Midwestern small-timers their cutting edge (they continue on his new American Radio Company show) is a rare mix of exile's longing and eye-rolling exasperation. Were we really that awful, and was it really that grand?

These are the elements, more or less, of this loopy, endearing novel (the author's first, it is surprising to realize) about the early days of radio. The time is the mid-'30s, the place is Studio B of Station WLT, Minneapolis. There is a jinx on Studio B, "the snakebite studio at WLT, the tomb of the radio mummy . . . Dad Benson gasped for breath during Friendly Neighbor and two huge flies dove into his throat and almost choked him . . . Reed Seymour once got the hiccups in there so bad his partial plate came off and he had to gum the news. And a week later, three of the Shepherd Boys, a gospel quartet, < slipped in and quietly de-pantsed him during a long account of a tragic house fire leaving 6 Persons Dead in St. Paul. He kept talking but he yipped twice when they pulled off his shorts."

The rubes out in radioland believed everything they heard, and some of the performers did too. Dad Benson ladled out cow-chip philosophy on or off mike, effortlessly spooning out such nifties as "East or west, home is best. There's no summer without winter . . . Hunger makes the beans taste better." But Marjery Moore, who played sweet, 10-year-old Little Becky on Dad's show until she was a raunchy 29, was a Camel-smoking delinquent who learned "within days of coming on Friendly Neighbor that she could get a big rise out of the radio folks by saying things in her Little Becky voice, such as 'Hi, mister, want to see my panties?' "

Even after WLT is making big money, owner Ray Soderberg is worried about radio's insubstantiality, which seems to him "like running a hotel with no rooms, just a lobby." He broods about the false bonhomie of fathead announcers, the fake warmth of radio stars laying on the charm to sell you hair tonic. But the big money keeps getting bigger.

That was then. Glory days, but as the years and the story's somewhat invertebrate plot progress -- Keillor's authentically rural narrative method is infinite digression -- the pickings thin out. Like the rest of WLT's hayseeds and gallus snappers, the Shepherd Boys begin to lose listeners. In their prime, Keillor relates, they "could kill a quart like it was lemonade and and then they would jump in the sack with anything in high heels, hop out and sing 'The Old Rugged Cross,' and feel so good, they'd jump right back in." Maybe they still could, given the chance, but unemployment looms. With Frank White, the author's bright-eyed hero, they are exiled to the sticks, sent on the road "in an old schoolbus, rattling from one end of the five- state area to the other playing $15 dates at high school assemblies and insane asylums and sleeping in your clothes on couches and eating slabs of grease and enduring the shame and the squalor until one day your mind snapped and they found you in your underwear crawling down a corn row in Kandiyohi County with an empty in your hand."

This is ranting excess of the finest quality, and a case could be made that its author is the most gifted and prodigious humorist the U.S. has heard from since the old steamboat pilot ran aground. Prophetic stuff too. One doubter, + foreseeing the twilight of radio, broods that "they will invent something. It'll have the same effect as bourbon but it won't give you headaches or upset the stomach, so it'll be used even by the kiddos. It'll earn gazillions. And boys, they are not going to deal us in on that hand." What Keillor has sketched is the West in Spenglerian decline, with cable and pay-per-view just beyond the horizon.