Small-town lives in the slow lane

Nothing much changes in Lake Wobegon - and that's becoming a problem for Garrison Keillor, says Adam Mars-Jones

The title might be Liberty, justifiably so since it concerns the preparations for Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July parade 2006, but the real concern of Garrison Keillor's new novel is with a rather less glamorous abstraction, almost liberty's shadow self: responsibility. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, then the price of celebrating it is hardly less high: eternal committee meetings. Clint Bunsen, the hero of the book, has masterminded the parade for years, a vacuous event when he inherited it, pretty much "open house for anybody that wanted to trudge four blocks with a flag in hand".

  1. Liberty
  2. by Garrison Keillor

He purged the cowpie bingo and created a nonpareil civic spectacle, complete with a unicycle basketball team and a clown juggling tabby cats, which in 2005 appeared for 45 dazzling seconds on CNN, reaching an estimated 57 million viewers. Too bad the name of the town wasn't mentioned.

But now he is being accused of being a tyrant (though hopes are high for the return of CNN) and his resignation has been accepted without him even knowing he had offered it - he was in a hurry for the men's room at the time. From 5 July on, he will revert to being merely the town's auto mechanic, so he has even more reason than usual for wanting everything to run smoothly.

Keillor's comedy is low key, conversational (he first became known, after all, as a radio performer). He doesn't set out to provoke wild laughter, but provides a steady, temperate stream of drollery. One of the things that makes him popular is that he doesn't seem so very different himself from the parallel-world Minnesotans whose lives he describes with such forlorn fondness. They are judged not from above, but from the side, in a way that seems neighbourly.

This isn't high comedy (what's on offer in, say, Mapp and Lucia or Fawlty Towers), which calls for not only more energy, but a more stratified society, a greater pressure of anxiety than is to be found on the porches and in the diners of small towns, where the atmosphere is more depressive than hysterical.

It isn't hard, though, for a British audience, steeped in Brief Encounter and perhaps the novels of Barbara Pym, to find something familiar in the way cosiness can shade into despair. Everybody knowing everybody else can be a recipe for hell, as when the waitress in a cafe comments on your new footwear: "You got those from a rummage sale, right? I knew it. They were my Uncle Ralph's. Blue boat shoes. SueAnn had a hard time throwing those away because they were the shoes Ralph died in. He was on his way to go fishing and he got as far as the dock a nd he felt bad and he sat down with the bait bucket in his lap and he died. Bang. Just like that."

In Lake Wobegon (population 2,182), the tone is set by "bitter, chip-on-a-shoulder German Catholics" and "dark Lutherans who believe that life is misery and if it doesn't seem so now, be patient" - adjacent shades of grey on the paint card of life. In relative terms, Clint is a real ball of fire, who, as a young man, had enrolled for art classes in California at the end of his navy service, until he was somehow magnetised back into the Minnesota rut. He only came home to give his mother a farewell hug and suddenly he was married and running the family business.

Now he is 60, the children have grown up and his wife Irene understands him all too well. Two paths to a new life are open to him. He is being encouraged to run for Congress, since his local speeches have made an impression (and presumably he looks manipulable). Or he could run off with Angelica Pflame, a 28-year-old psychic he has been chatting to on the internet, that vast clearing house of delusion and temptation.

Angelica represents Liberty in the most literal sense - that is, she wore the seven-pointed crown and carried the torch aloft in last year's parade (though Clint didn't know her then) and has been booked to appear again. She feels a connection with him. It helps that he has sent off a DNA sample to a lab in Phoenix for analysis and been told that he is almost half-Spanish. The emotional tentativeness falls away from him - "He once was Norwegian but now he was free." He disinters his old Duotone guitar and starts to improvise songs in a Hispanic vein ("Love me, my lady, for soon I must die... come, let us eat the best oranges now and not wait"). He is a Spaniard stranded by the waters of Lake Wobegon. He is not of their northern race.

It has to be said that from the start there seems no prospect of Clint taking either path, into public life or a romantic new start. Keillor isn't Capra and he isn't at his ease describing sexual rapture ("And then she needed a drink of water and she tiptoed to the bathroom leading him behind her, her hand grasping his tool, and then she sat on the bathroom counter and opened herself and they did it there, and then back to bed - a long, careening rush down miles of steep slope until he finally burst the bonds of earth and briefly flew..."). Angelica, good hearted, flaky yet somehow also acute and trustworthy, is one of the least convincing sirens in living memory.

Narrative tension is low. For a while, Keillor builds up a rival committee member as a source of conflict, then thinks better of it (making everyone fundamentally nice may be his greatest weakness as a writer). The book's whole plot is no more than a racetrack on which certain discredited virtues, some of which currently pass for character flaws - reliability, not saying everything you think, knowing your limits - can be brought to a canter until they glow, before being led back to the barn.

Just like his hero (for all his sudden Spanishness), Garrison Keillor is more attuned to the measured and deliberate than the impulsive. The account of Clint's intimacy with Irene, whose sexual component can become wholly engrossing but makes him feel at the beginning that he is starting a car on a cold morning, is much more convincing than his abandon with Angelica. The odds are heavily stacked in favour of the long haul. Irene knows that no one else will ever bother to get the ratio of mayonnaise to mustard right in Clint's potato salad.

The moral is spelled out rather too clearly in a description of a contest, for which Irene has made the prize, a strawberry-rhubarb pie: "The egg toss was a crowd favourite, married couples tossing a fresh egg back and forth, taking a step back for each successful catch, lobbing the egg back and forth, higher, higher, step back, back, back, a long toss lands in the lady's bosom ker-splat, a man misjudges and the egg hits him in the schnozzola ker-splort, and finally it's down to the last three couples, tossing the egg 90 and 100 feet, and one splatters, and now there are two, and now we start to see that this is how marriage works, actually - the hurling of fragile living matter back and forth, the art of the catch."

Does regional literature have to be conservative? Is it reactionary by definition? You'd think so, reading a book like this, where "there is no normal" is offered as one of the lessons to be learned from living in a small town, but the hero has to give himself a good talking-to so as not to stare at the ring in a man's ear. For a different perspective, read John Murray's Radio Activity, proof that you can love the area you were born in (Cumbria in Murray's case), its history and language and still see yourself as a world citizen in cultural terms, immune to the temptation of folksiness.

Garrison Keillor: a life

Born 7 August 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota.

Educated University of Minnesota, where he studied English.

Married Mary Guntzel, 1965-1976; Ulla Skaerved, 1985-1990; Jenny Lind Nilsson, 1995-.

Career 1969: Began hosting A Prairie Home Entertainment on Minnesota Public Radio. The show has been through several incarnations and continues today as A Prairie Home Companion. 1970: First story published in the New Yorker. 1985: Lake Wobegon Days, the first of seven Lake Wobegon books, published. 1994 Inducted into Radio Hall of Fame. 2004: Homegrown Democrat, collection of essays, published. 2006: Wrote screenplay for A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman.

He says 'Writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other people's lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from scraps.'

They say 'Keillor's is one of the great voices of our time, like that of Homer Simpson or George W Bush' - David Kirby, New York Times

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