Review by New York Times Review
Garrison Keillor's new novel is set in his 'little town that time forgot.' GARRISON KEILLOR'S last full-length fictional trip to Lake Wobegon occurred in 2001, when he cast his mind back to the town in the summer of 1956. Six years and roughly five decades later, his readers - who in Keillor's company always feel like listeners - will be relieved to know that in his new novel, "Pontoon," the Whippets are still playing baseball; the Chatterbox Cafe and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery remain open; the awful Magendanz family continues to be awful; and the monument to the Unknown Norwegian continues to stand a block or so from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. The local police may not have much use for their new antiterrorism equipment, but readers who venture into Lake Wobegon in search of security or nostalgia will, as always, be brought up short by surprisingly large measures of sadness and dread. On the American continuum, this town of 900 people beside its 678.2-acre lake has always sat a little closer to Winesburg than Mayberry. Gentle humor and basic decency may light Lake Wobegon's grid, but Keillor's imagination, the town's only power source, is ever mindful of darkness within and without. Lake Wobegon's population, like that of most small Midwestern towns, is aging pretty fast these days; it may say something that the central figure of this latest Keillor novel is dead from the first sentence. The details of Evelyn Peterson's passing will no doubt provide matter for dispute down at the Chatterbox - "Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that" - but dead she surely is, and what's more, Evelyn turns out to have been not quite the woman she was thought to be. Yes, a widow for 19 years, a brisk walker, a writer of poems, a regular at both church and the Indian casino: all that can be stipulated. But it now appears that Evelyn, who liked to say that "there's a lot of human nature in everybody," spent the last dozen years taking an extra helping of her own, as she resumed a love affair she'd barely gotten started, back in 1941, with Raoul Olson. Evelyn's daughter finds out, to her surprise and initial resentment, that her just-deceased mother and Raoul - now "a husky old coot" with great charm, dyed hair, not much height and vitality to burn - had been having a swell, surreptitious time on the dance floors and bedsheets of hotels from Las Vegas to Branson. Surely, both Evelyn and Raoul had some late-life happiness coming to them. She had spent 44 years married to the wrong man, who finally moved out when he developed a long-distance fixation on a porn star; Raoul let his own marriage collapse after the loss of his young son to leukemia. But Barbara, Evelyn's daughter, has had plenty of problems, too: her divorce; a brain-damaged daughter; the sacrifices she's had to make for the son she conceived during an affair with a Roman Catholic priest. Barbara may have a very fat and kind-hearted lover named Oliver, but her grievances and difficulties tend to crowd out incidental joys: "She was 57 years old, eight years from retirement. She was bumping along on 25 hours a week during the school year, cooking in the cafeteria, delivering the Minneapolis paper three days a week." She is also struggling to quit drinking and to become an atheist, and if she hasn't exactly blamed Evelyn for her woes, she certainly resents how little attention her mother seemed to pay them. In the book's early chapters, Barbara appears to be little more than a self-dramatizing whiner, and a reader steels himself for what promise to be a long couple of hundred pages. But Keillor soon starts doing lovely, plausible things with this daughter, allowing her to grow in strength and sympathy (her own and ours) as she decides to celebrate the post-70 Evelyn, "not the Sunday School teacher and Girl Scout leader" but "the old broad who said what the hell and took a lover." In conformity with the departed's wishes, Barbara will pour Evelyn's ashes into a green hollowed-out bowling ball (a present from Raoul) and have them dropped into Lake Wobegon. Actually, Barbara's son, Kyle, will drop them from a parasail - a performance that will end up being imperiled by a burning hot-air balloon and some visiting Danish ministers out for a boat ride. Only the most skillful literary hands should attempt the combination of flat-out farce and genuine emotion; Keillor, like Larry McMurtry in "Terms of Endearment," is up to the job. The author can be forgiven one or two internal inconsistencies - he's performed versions of this story for years - as well as a few personal indulgences. The last several years have been hard ones politically for Keillor (his last book of prose, in 2004, was "Homegrown Democrat"), and in one or two of her recollected utterances he allows Evelyn to sound as if she's coming over Air America instead of "A Prairie Home Companion." At bottom this is a tough-minded book, as aware of life's betrayals and griefs as it is of the grace notes and buffooneries that leaven everyday existence. Keillor explains with harrowing economy how Barbara's ex-husband, Lloyd, crumpled into passivity ("He could outmeek anyone. ... He just sort of got smaller and smaller and then she divorced him"), and the description of Lloyd's decline is all the more effective for being placed close by two heartening lists of God's plenty: the summer sights and sounds that come to Barbara as she sits on her porch and the jumble of delightful junk she sees at a garage sale: "a jigsaw puzzle of the 1965 Minnesota Twins, a Hamm's beer serving tray, a set of six maroon goblets with painted flowers ugly as sin." Keillor has always been a great cataloger, equal parts Homer and Montgomery Ward, and rarely to better effect than in "Pontoon." If anything in this novel stands between the characters and their appreciation of such bounty, it is the churches in which so much of Lake Wobegon's life has always taken place. Pastor Ingqvist may be a fine low-key fellow, straining to minister with a bit more modernity and meaning to his Lutheran flock, but his denomination comes in for holy hell, again and again, from an assortment of characters. "That's why I love to travel," Evelyn writes in a letter to Barbara. "Because I need to get away from the killers. Righteous people can be so cruel when they go after sinners and infidels, I just don't want to be around to see it. Our people settled out on the prairie because they like straight lines and neat corners. I know these people. I'm related to some of them. And sometimes I'd like to wring their necks. And then it's time to get in the car and go." In old age, Evelyn has realized, "there are no answers, just stories." With all their familiar elements, Keillor's Lake Wobegon books have become a set of synoptic gospels, full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope. This one even contains an epilogue, the closest thing to an afterlife that fiction can offer. On the American continuum, Lake Wobegon has always sat a little closer to Winesburg than Mayberry. Thomas Mallon's latest book is the novel "Fellow Travelers."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
When the angel of death came for Evelyn Peterson, she didn't know that Debbie Detmer would be back in Lake Wobegon for the first time in ages to be married, kinda, in a big lakeside ceremony on a pontoon boat with, among other things, a parachuting Elvis impersonator and a hot-air balloon all on the day Evelyn's memorial, also at the lake, would be held. Of course, how could she know that? Nobody else in town knew Debbie was coming, except for her parents, and given how Walter's been since that fall in the bathroom, maybe only Mrs. D. could be said to have known. During the days 'twixt death and marriage, lots happens. Barbara, Evelyn's daughter, learns that her mother hadn't been visiting relatives on her many out-of-town jaunts; she'd been partying with Raoul, the man she should have married. Barbara's son Kyle decides to honor Grandma's wish to have her ashes deposited in the lake by dropping them while parasailing. Now consider the possibilities with faux Elvis, balloon, and Kyle fleeting over the lake simultaneously . . . It's just the capper to a hyperbusy slice of small-town life of the sort that Keillor regularly exploits so hilariously and affectingly, and the moral of which may be that we'd all best be humble. Only comedian of horrors Christopher Moore, in his tales of Pine Cove, California, rivals Keillor as a provincial farceur.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
K eillor's delightful latest addition to the Lake Wobegon series, set in the fictional Minnesota town known to legions of A Prairie Home Companion radio show fans, opens with a typically laconic musing: "Evelyn was an insomniac, so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that." The author's storytelling skills come to the fore as he describes Evelyn Peterson, a sprightly 82-year-old whose secret life of romance and adventure is revealed after her death. Her daughter, Barbara, a please-everyone type with a fondness for chocolate liqueur, finds Evelyn dead in bed, and things snowball from there. Debbie Detmer, who made her fortune as an animal therapist for the rich and famous, is planning a grand commitment ceremony (on a pontoon boat in Lake Wobegon) to celebrate her relationship with a private jet time-share salesman. Meanwhile, Barbara plans to carry out her mother's wishes for a cremation ceremony involving a bowling ball filled with her ashes, and then there's the group of Danish Lutheran ministers stopping by Lake Wobegon on their tour of the U.S. Keillor's longtime fans may find some of the material familiar (he notes he's told this story "several hundred times... with many variations"), but there's plenty of fun to be had with the well-timed deadpans and homespun wit. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The life and loves of a spirited woman cast a beguiling shadow over the good citizens of Lake Wobegon in Keillor's warmhearted latest comic romp. It opens with a killer sentence ("Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that") and follows it with a gem-like introductory paragraph summarizing Evelyn Peterson's vigorous life and introduction to the afterlife. We then learn that Evelyn--a leggy, energetic beauty with a mind of her own--kicked up her heels after divorcing her morose husband of 40 years, traveled and raised hell and took up with old boyfriend Raoul (aka TV's "Yonny Yonson of the Yungle"), thus setting a free-spirited example that scandalized her Lutheran neighbors and challenged her 50-something daughter Barbara. The latter, herself divorced, the mother of an adult retarded daughter and a son in college desperate to know how to live his life, is bedeviled by a drinking problem and a decision over whether to honor Evelyn's directions for a rather unconventional burial service. These problems are compounded by the return of local "bad girl" Debbie Detmer, who has made a fortune as a California aromatherapist and is back for a "commitment ceremony" yoking her to her noncommittal boyfriend. None of this quite amounts to a plot, as Keillor (Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America, 2004, etc.) frequently strays away from linear narrative to write about who or whatever happens to interest him. Still, events proceed with amiable illogic, peaking in a farcical scene featuring Evelyn's grandson Kyle on water skis, 24 apostate Danish pastors who happen to be visiting, a "fish-catching" dog named Bruno and residual disturbances related to Debbie's ill-fated commitment ceremony. The family and community ties are strong, the people are good looking and the belly-laugh quotient is above average. Tune in. You won't be disappointed. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
