Wobegon Boy

Monologuist, author and radio personality Garrison Keillor has grown a bit smug, sentimental and shopworn over the years. Although those qualities are apparent in this tape, it's nonetheless a funny, touching, shyly romantic and mildly autobiographical novel. And Keillor, who has been honing his Lake Wobegon tales for a decade or two on public radio's "Prairie Home Companion," has his delivery, as well as his prose, down cold. After hearing him reading his own opus, one wonders how the bare words on the printed page could possibly possess anywhere near as much lyricism and nuance. Indeed, his oral skills almost completely mask his literary flaws. Squeeze-box musical bridges add to the charm. The engineering by his longtime associate Tom Mudge is pristine. It's just a shame that his prickly jibes at the public radio world, which are merely incidental to the story, will be fully comprehended and appreciated by only a few. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 3, 1997
Can it really be 10 years since Lake Wobegon Days showed that Keillor's hilarious and sometimes poignant stories about his imagined Minnesota town could please a multitude of readers as much as they delighted a huge radio audience? This time Keillor has had the happy inspiration of sending a bred-in-the-bone Wobegoner, John Tollefson, out into the wider world to see how his stern Lutheran values hold up in the rather less rigid context of 1990s America. Not so badly, as it turns out. Tollefson becomes director of a campus radio station at a college in upstate New York, where the library runs a very distant second in popularity to reruns of Gilligan's Island, and also a hapless investor in a restaurant based on the notion of vegetables grown in its own garden, which is the eventual victim of a hippie contractor with dreams of grandeur. He also finds a winsome girlfriend in Alida Freeman, a Columbia historian, and goes through Wobegonian agonies before he can commit himself to marriage. As always with Keillor, a plot is the longest possible distance between two points, since he can't resist an anecdote, diversionary episode or fond recollection along the way, and these are so many and so rich that forward motion is sometimes barely visible. But who could complain about such set pieces as the death, funeral and wake of John's father, the account of the family fortune that escaped to Buenos Aires, the theological chapter on the Dark and Happy Lutherans (even the Wobegon atheists are Lutheran, for that, of course, is the faith of the God they don't believe in). Among all the fun and games is a very real sense of abiding American character and mores, a passionate devotion to qualities of courage and compassion that makes Keillor's books salutary as well as delightfully daffy. BOMC dual main selection; 20-city author tour; Penguin HighBridge audio read by the author.