Lonesome Whistle Blowing

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This is parlor harmonizing, nothing more, but Keillor's pleasant, summer-weight baritone carries well. It bounces off a satellite into the electronic ears of more than 260 U.S. public radio stations--plus, antipodally enough, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation--and householders across the land shush one another the way people did decades ago when Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, or Fibber McGee and Molly came on the air. The theater audience settles back.

What follows, listeners know, will be two hours of Keillor and his friends, which is to say of honky-tonk piano, jazz, mournful old Protestant hymns and country music, much of it from some fairly strange countries. This flow of funk is interrupted by loopy commercials for the Deep Valley Bed, the kind with the old-time mattress that sags in the middle, making prolonged marital discord impossible; Bertha's Kitty Boutique, where doting and guilt-ridden cat owners can find, among other cossets, a special cat ice cream called Gatto Gelato to cool kitty's tongue on hot days; and, of course, the celebrated Powdermilk Biscuits ("Heavens, they're tasty!"), which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done."

The centerpiece of A Prairie Home Companion is a very long monologue, or out-of-body experience, in which Keillor, his low, breathy voice achieving sonorities like those of a train whistle in the distance at midnight, gives the news from a tiny, some say imaginary, Minnesota farm hamlet called Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." The same sturdy but hard-to-find settlement is the subject of Keillor's new book, Lake Wobegon Days (Viking; $17.95), a pack of beguiling lies that has been on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks and, with some 700,000 copies in print, is the publishing sleeper of the year. Keillor has written memorable humor pieces that have nothing to do with rural Minnesota, including a lovely, raunchy story that ran in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, about the troubles of the first woman major-league baseball player. (Twenty-seven of his magazine pieces were collected in 1982's Happy to Be Here, which sold 210,000 copies.) But it is the Lake Wobegon imaginings that raise comparisons with the Midwestern bedfalls and dogaclysms of James Thurber and, further east, with the work of the late E.B. White, the essayist of The New Yorker who wrote so memorably of rural Maine. This is high company, but one additional comparison is beginning to be made. Keillor has sometimes performed in a white suit, perhaps with comparison aforethought, and so, of course, did that illustrious Midwestern yarn spinner and lecture-hall tiger Mark Twain. What some say now is that another major humorist is loose in the nation's ticklish midsection and that Keillor's storytelling approaches the quality of Twain's.