Mad, moving, mythical Minnesota

Jonathan Mirsky

LAKE WOBEGON SUMMER 1956 by Garrison Keillor Faber, £16.99, pp. 291, ISBN 0.571 210147

Visitors to America who tune to National Public Radio sometimes stumble on A Prairie Home Companion, the sweet, melancholy, hilarious, gothic, sentimental songs, skits, interviews, and monologues produced, directed and starred in every week by Garrison Keillor. He has invented a town of German and Norwegian-American farmers and small shopkeepers on Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the men are strong, the women beautiful, and 'every child is above average'. Religious, stoical, neighbourly but reserved, gossipy and occasionally naughty. Keillor's neighbours have done for him what her tiny palette did for Jane Austen. The centrepiece is a five-minute solo sketch by Mr Keillor — who also sings his own catchy songs — usually about his mythical town. Each of these short masterpieces moves from absurdity to horror to affection, pushed by Keillor's slightly mournful voice to the edge of sentimentality, and then pulls back with a joke.

Mr Keillor is also an author. His previous books, which sell well in the US, like this newest one mine the same friendly, knowing, sometimes sinister vein. Lake Wobegon Summer, wisecracks and irony on the surface, sad and occasionally tragic below, takes place in 1956 and is narrated by 14-year-old Gary who considers himself a tree-toad, 'a gink ... a hayseed Herkimer Jerkimer from the sticks and also a freak and a sicko'. He expects, when his inner life of sexual fantasies is exposed (he secretly reads High School Orgies), to be sent to a

hospital

where they will place copper electrodes on my temples and throw a switch and scorch my brains so I never have another dirty thought in my life, and I will return home a placid moon-faced boy with an IQ of 45 who sits on the porch steps all day with his dog Scooter.

God tells Gary off about his sexual fantasies:

Therefore I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs . . . and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and the walleye — yea verily, even the nightcrawler and eelpout.

There is a good deal of Catcher in the Rye here: the lonely teenager who sees everything with an x-ray and dyspeptic eye. But it is less soft-centred and, to use Holden Caulfield's favourite word, less 'phony' than Salinger's too-admired book. Gary loves his Aunt Eva against whose warm back he snuggled and whose smell he loved as a child when he was on holiday at her farm.

She liked the exact same things I liked. Meat loaf. Fried-egg sandwiches. Devil's-food cake. Fresh tomatoes warm right off the vine ... Farts. Talking late at night.

But one day his mother tells him there is something 'nutty' about Eva and from then on Gary avoids her, to her helpless pain — which he senses but ignores.

I doubt if this book can be read with poignant déjà vu by Americans under the age of 50, much less foreigners. I loved the close observation. Here is the

Famous Del Ray Ballroom on Lake Elmo ... the handsome maestro holding the long white baton, and women in skimpy dresses with the hemline above their knees dancing, knees in, heels up, arms akimbo, on the long veranda.

Gary's second-favourite relative is his worldly older cousin Kate. She teaches him to kiss and how to hold a cigarette stylishly. She falls for a local baseball star — Mr Keillor is wonderful at describing the fieldof-dreams-like national game of the American sticks — who gets her pregnant. In Lake Wobegon, among the smugly pious members of the Sanctified Brethren, the Chosen Remnant of Saints Gathered to the Lord's Name and Faithful to the Literal Meaning of His Word, this is bound to end in hellfire. But as Kate sits, weeping and heaving with morning sickness under the beauty parlour's hairdryer on her wedding day, the other women

all stood round the bride admiring her hair — all the old sorceresses and priestesses and oracles of our town, stood by her, patting her, murmuring priestessly things, and even knowing what they know about romance and marriage, nonetheless they wished her the hest.

I have a lot of time for Keillor; but I'm a way-over-50 American and I like moseying down memory lane.