Magic in the air
Francis King
RADIO ROMANCE by Garrison Keillor Faber, £14.99, pp. 401 he title of this novel is doubly apt. In the first place, Keillor is writing of a quarter-century period, between the mid- Twenties and the early Fifties, when radio provided humdrum and even desolate lives with what little romance was ever to illumi- nate them. In the second place, Keillor's own career has been a romance of radio. For some dozen years, as host of a popular live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, he deployed his voice, suggest- ive of some Mid-West farmer with a gift of the gab reminiscing in leisurely fashion to a group of his cronies over a pipe on the stoop of his homestead, to gain first nation- al and then international fame as a story- teller. This success gives the lie to his repeated assertion in the novel that the power seeped out of radio in the Fifties, with the general availability of television.
The founders in Minneapolis of Station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) are two brothers, Ray and Roy Soderberg, who decide in 1926 that the starting of a radio station as part of their new restaurant may help to boost their sales of 'The Best Quick Lunch in Town at Any Price'. In no time at all, the station is so successful that CBS tries to take it over. Amorous Ray is both incredulous and disgusted:
After a year they had broadcast more words than Shakespeare ever wrote, most of it small talk, chatter, rat droppings.
Scholarly Roy is merely thankful that he is now rich enough to devote his life to scientific research.
There are two dominant threads in the narrative woven, with such dexterous industry, by Keillor. The first of these is the way in which the WLT equivalents of Mrs Dale's Diary or The Archers become more lifelike for listeners than their own dim, dreary existence: Such people find it more interesting to hear disembodied characters nattering on about their pets, their vaca- tions, their children, their illnesses, their quarrels, their love-affairs, their careers, than to hear their neighbours do so. To their fictional 'friends' at the radio station they therefore post letters and presents which they would not dream of posting to their real friends.
The second thread is the disparity between radio characters and the actors who give them voice. Dear Little Becky, for example, an innocent child, is played by an adult who chainsmokes, uses foul language, and sleeps with any of her male colleagues who shows willing. Similarly, Dear Little Buddy, fictionally close to a loving father, is in real life battered and exploited by him. The sports commentator, Buck Lamont, is so blind that he can hardly make out what is happening on a sports field. Gospel choirs drink, take drugs and fornicate. A fresh-voiced singer, whom every listener assumes to be a beautiful young girl, is in fact a stout, blowsy 50-year-old, marooned in a wheel-chair. The prolific author of many of the soaps amuses herself by writ- ing highly raunchy dialogue, which she knows can never be broadcast.
All the shows go out live; so that much of the comedy of the novel derives from the intrusion of gross reality into fragile make- believe. Cleaning women irrupt into the studio with their noisy vacuum-cleaners; a drunken singer bawls out some obscene ditties instead of the sentimental folk-songs expected of him; arguments and even rows take place between performers while they are still on the air. Since this is a novel of some 400 pages, the fun soon becomes repetitious and therefore predictable.
If there is one central story, it is that of Francis With, who becomes besotted with radio while still a boy. His father, a railway- man, having been boiled alive in a hideous accident and his mother having gone insane in consequence, Francis, his name now changed to Frank White, gets a job at the station and so starts on an increasingly successful career which eventually makes him into a star of television.
The trouble with the novel is precisely that afflicting the serials which it sets out to deride. Incident succeeds incident, now comic, now sentimental, now tragic, like so many bricks neatly laid out in a row. Even- tually, these bricks will be used to construct something significant, one tells oneself. But they never are. Significantly, chunks of Keillor's novel have already appeared in the New Yorker and the Gettysburg Review, as though they were individual stories. One cannot imagine chunks of, say, The Scarlet Letter or The Golden Bowl similarly lending themselves to satisfactory abstraction. That said, there can be no doubt of Keillor's narrative gifts. At one point he writes of radio having been discovered too late:
In the proper order of things it shoiuld have come somewhere between the wheer and the printing press. It belonged to the age of the bards and the story-tellers ... when all news and knowledge were transmitted by telling. Keillor himself, for all the sophistication of his literary style, also belongs to the age of the bards and the story-tellers. Repetitious, rambling, anecdotal, he exerts the same potent, primitive appeal as the griot whom one sees, surrounded by gaping crowds, in an African bazaar.
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