Books: Home, Home on the Strange Lake Wobegon Days

• Share

"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.