Customer Reviews

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Lake Wobegon Novels)

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Garrison Keillor, best known for his long-running radio saga A Prairie Home Companion, has created another memorable portrait of the Midwest in Pontoon. His fictitious farming town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota is populated by Scandinavian descendants whose lives revolve around church services and gossip, not necessarily in that order. The town's two religious beacons are the Catholic parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church. The residents are proud of their Scandinavian heritage, including the town statue of the Unknown Norwegian and omnipresent lutefisk at church functions.

I grew up listening to Garrison on A Prairie Home Companion and attempted (unsuccessfully) to watch the recent Robert Altman film adaptation, so when I saw Pontoon, I snapped it up. Part of my love affair with Lake Wobegon stems from my own immigrant background; my grandmother immigrated from Poland in 1913, and my youth was spent at Polish masses and social gatherings (in Polish, of course!) filled with pierogi and gossip, much like Lake Wobegonians (minus the lutefisk, thankfully). I also grew up in a small Midwest town, so I could appreciate Garrison's good-natured ribbing at the monotony of life in small towns.

Garrison's characters are exquisitely drawn, and you can easily imagine them to be your next-door neighbors, full of idiosyncrasies and hidden wisdom. In Pontoon, the central character is Evelyn, an octogenarian with a passion for life who enjoys shocking the quieter Wobegonians with her forward ideas. Evelyn's sudden death wreaks havoc on her family, particularly on her alcoholic daughter Barbara, since her scandalous final wish is to be cremated and dumped into Lake Wobegon in a green bowling ball. Needless to say, this is unacceptable behavior in a conservative Midwestern town.

As the novel unfolds in hilariously unexpected twists and turns, a number of Wobegonians' lives intersect. Exiled Debbie Detmer returns from California a millionaire for a "ceremony of commitment." No weddings for this New Age guru, thankyouverymuch, but a hot air balloon and parachuting Elvis impersonator share the bill with imported French cheese, champagne, and world-class chefs flown in from California. Meanwhile, Barbara's son Kyle is thinking about ditching his girlfriend and dropping out of college to start a business involving sprinkling loved ones' ashes from a parasail. Pastor Inqvist is playing host to two dozen renegade Danish Lutheran pastors. At the hysterical climax, these and other stories intertwine in the blink of an eye during Evelyn's fateful memorial service on Lake Wobegon.

The writing is crisp and snappy, and I particularly loved the flashbacks to 1941 as Evelyn's secret lifelong romance with Raoul was revealed. Spunky Evelyn has many lessons to teach all of us about regret, seizing opportunity, and how to enjoy life to its fullest right until the end. By turns tender, philosophical, and laugh-out-loud funny, Pontoon is a must-read. Be sure to check out the detailed map of Lake Wobegon on the dust jacket!

It's been about four years since the last Wobegone book, LAKE WOBEGONE SUMMER 1956. That one featured Gary, Keillor's alter ego. I didn't really like it until I heard excerpts from it in one of Keillor's Prairie Home Companion PBS specials. Suddenly, it got a whole lot better. The man has the best "radio" voice since Jean Shepherd.

I liked PONTOON a little bit better because these characters seem a whole lot more real. Evelyn Peterson is an 82-year-old Lutheran lady who dies at the beginning of the book. She had no time for funerals. She wants to be cremated, her ashes put in a bowling ball and thrown in a lake. She leaves a letter for daughter Barbara outlining her wishes. Barbara also discovers letters from Raoul, a lover she never knew her mother had. If you live in Minnesota you'll recognize Raoul. He's a moderator of a children's show that featured THE LITTLE RASCALS who sounds a whole lot like Clelland Card, creator of "Axel and his Dog."

The other featured character is Debbie Detmer, who had left Wobegone to make her fortune in Hollywood. She did, all right, but in a rather strange profession, aroma therapist to pets. This is just Keillor cracking wise. An aroma therapist to dogs is no stranger than tourists who visit the bathroom where Senator Craig was arrested.

Occasionally Keillor will throw in a poem or a song lyric that I would guess come from his show. "Oh the horses stood around with their feet upon the ground and who will wind my wristwatch when I'm gone? We feed the baby garlic so we can find him in the dark, and a girl's best friend is her mother" is a sample. He can also get down-right philosophical: "The trick is to not want it that much. Want it less. When you get to where you don't want it all, then you might get it." Nobody does pathos mixed with humor as well as Keillor.

Keillor also seems to be suggesting that living in Wobegone might not be the best sort of life decision to make. Evelyn only started to live when she hit her seventies, traveling all sorts of places with Raoul. Her cremation and burial in a bowling ball is a message to her daughter to live life to the fullest, not to settle for a staid existence.

Having at one time been a huge fan, I had pretty much declared myself completely finished with reading or listening to Garrison Keillor--done with hearing him in love with the sound of breathing through his nose on the Writer's Almanac, done with his increasingly indulgent weekend radio show (and the sycophantic and pretentious NPR listeners that praise it), and done with that horribly boring and eventless movie based on his work--when someone gave me this.

I listened to it, for lack of anything else to listen to on my morning drive, and I have to say: I liked it. It's good.

The characters, for the most part seem real and believable, the action is amusing, and the writing is clear and often funny.

"Pontoon" tells the antilinear story of a woman's death--of her life before it, of her family, of her neighbors, and it manages to entwine all of these lives into an amusing (if somewhat predictable and drawn-out and over-the-top) ending. It's touching and funny at the same time, and is, with one or two exceptions, a fairly accurate portrait of how small-town life can be.

As another entry in the Lake Wobegon canon, it's solid--not as good as "Lake Wobegon Days" or even "Wobegon Boy," but much better than say, "Leaving Home." On the audio version, Keillor does a good job of reading it, and I was grateful that some producer thought wisely enough to place the mic away from his wheezy nostrils. I mean, seriously, listen to the Writer's Almanac some morning; it sounds as if he's just finished running before every episode, or as if he just chugged a pan of grease. The guy's evidently in love with the sound of it, like a guitarist who likes to mic the sounds of his fingers squeaking down the frets. You can almost hear his nosehairs rustling.

Anyway. "Pontoon": a good book. And a good audio book.

Check it out.

In PONTOON, Garrison Keillor blindsides his readers with understatement: "His breath would've knocked a buzzard off a garbage truck." He reveals the subtleties of Norwegian cuisine, particularly lutfisk: "It is reminiscent of the afterbirth of a dog or the world's largest chunk of phlegm."

He also illustrates Midwestern Lutheran emotional exuberance: "They are suspicious of pleasure. An old Norwegian as ugly as a toad meets a pale raven-haired beauty who hugs him and kisses him and takes him home to her father, the richest man in the country, and there is a lavish wedding and the couple retire to their French chateau by the lake, a wedding gift from her father, and the pale young beauty takes the old man upstairs and pours him a glass of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1963 and a minute later appears in diaphanous nightgown and sits beside him on the bed and says, What do you think, my darling. He says: it could be worse, that is for sure."

Keillor's mind twisting storytelling vocabulary and pacing is reminiscent of that of singer/songwriter Tom Waits'. Read PONTOON. Crack a smile. Laugh noisily, but be sure no one catches you.

The beauty of these Lake Wobegon books is that Garrison Keillor can let his hair down and be sexy like he never can on the radio. What is innuendo on A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION becomes full blown eroticism in these novels. Erotic like rural Minnesota; that is, slightly uptight--and so very hilarious.

As the new book starts off we meet Evelyn. She has just died. Keillor pays exquisite tribute throughout the book to the memory and the secret life of this vivacious octagenarian. Evelyn's family assembles for the service she wanted. Her cremains are to be placed in a bowling ball and dropped in the lake.

Keillor does a superb job of balancing a respect for the departed with the crazy shenanigans that unfold. His finale with 24 drunken Danish ministers on a pontoon boat is sheer genius.

Garrison Keillor is a fine and funny man, and I've always read his fiction with a great deal of appreciation. But in "Pontoon," he's outdone himself! It has places throughout where it is laugh-out-loud funny, but by the end, I was laughing so hard that I could hardly breathe! I read my public library's copy. Now I'm buying my own, because I'll want to read it again and again, whenever I need a reason so smile!

I saw these words written on a gold shield on the back of the dust jacket of this book. It means "We Are Who We Are" and is the motto of the town of Lake Wobegon.

That's perfect for this book. The small town folks are who they are and seem no worse for it.

If you grew up Lutheran in a small town in the Midwest, as I did, the material is wonderful! It brings back so many memories of my home town although we didn't have a lake.

I feel sorry for the readers who don't understand Keillor's sense of humor. It's good for what ails you---or is that in an ad for one of the products he advertises on A Prairie Home Companion? Read it and brighten up your day!

Another beautiful book from Garrison. If you haven't read any of his works you are really missing out. I am such a big fan of his work that I like to read it first and then listen to the audio book. Garrison is one of the few authors who can read their own work. This is the best book of the year!!!!

Could there be any better opening line for a book than this:

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

I am loving this book. Although I do prefer nonfiction, and become impatient with outlandish events and characters (as some of the scenes and characters in this book are), I do love Garrison Keillor's observations about people, their thoughts and their daily lives. Having grown up Plymouth Brethren myself, I find it perhaps more seamless than many readers to find snippets of hymns, sermons and theology woven into the narrative. And I do recognize the angst some characters have about their salvation! It feels like home to me, even though I don't have particularly fond memories of that upbringing. One reader's outlandish is another's normal, I guess!

"If there were no Lake Wobegon and all those loopy Lutherans living there to write about, someone would have had to invent it." Huh???

Yes, that's right. There are folks out there --- my quoted dear friend among them --- so captivated by Garrison Keillor's three decades of enchanting tales from this little village in Norwegian Middle America that they believe it really exists. Honestly, they do! What higher compliment could an author possibly wish for?

And PONTOON, Keillor's latest Lake Wobegon opus, makes matters of credibility even more challenging; the entire dust jacket displays all those places fans have visited over the years through his Prairie Home Companion radio readings. We begin, in fact, by reading a closed book...

There's the Sons of Knute Temple anchoring the eastern end of Second Avenue along the lakeshore; directly south lies the Farmer's Union Grain Elevator; directly across from that sits the imposing expanse of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church, flanked by school and rectory. You have to look over on the back cover to find the more diffident Lutheran church planted near the western end of Main Street. And in between are all the places that figure so large in the lives of Lake Wobegonians.

After a good 10 minutes spent poring over the delightful dust cover map, I finally got into the story and didn't emerge again until the very end. That's a typical Garrison Keillor experience. While it's happening, you live entirely within this so-real little world of his that conjures up all the values, fears, foibles, eccentricities and just plain old-fashioned foolishness many of us long for in a world where the phrase "simple pleasures" has become an oxymoron.

Lake Wobegon has always been one of those places whose wildest characters unabashedly stand out and whose traditions are often surprisingly remolded around family milestones such as weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries and the like. In PONTOON the fast-paced, aggressive, high-tech urban world comes face to face with the equally intense but much more endearing complexities of a small community that simply cannot be intimidated by outside forces.

It all starts with the quite ordinary fact of an old lady dying quietly in her sleep while reading a book. But feisty and with-it Evelyn has left behind a major bombshell --- a will that specifies cremation (scandalous!) followed by the aerial dropping of her ashes into Lake Wobegon, encased in a hollowed-out emerald green bowling ball. Her correspondence files turn out to reveal even more surprising secrets, but I won't spoil the fun by telling any.

Being the linear thinkers they are, however, the good (and not-so-good) Lutherans of the town quickly move past their initial shock. Various factions go about preparing their own "appropriate" goodbyes to Evelyn, amid the big and small crises of their own lives. Among them are her depressed alcoholic daughter and morally indecisive grandson, who dutifully work out the logistics of actually making the aerial bombardment a reality.

In the meantime, a prodigal daughter-made-good returns home with her boorish partner to stage a waterborne "commitment" ceremony aboard a local resident's pontoon boat (hence the title), but finds herself sucked back into bittersweet memories and realities that mess up her urbanized plans for life. Boor leaves in a snit, creating even more interesting ripples in the plot.

The inimitable delight, as with any Keillor tale, is in the meshing and entangling of details that produce bizarre results and memorable, even cataclysmic, events. And they aren't just of the slapstick genre that conjures up visions of chaos and confusion. In PONTOON, Keillor also delves more deeply into the psyche of characters whose inner and outer lives run on strangely dissonant parallel courses --- Evelyn's more surprisingly than all the rest put together.

Suffice it to say that Garrison Keillor has practically reinvented the truism that appearances are deceiving. In his hands, the art of deception is made miraculous, even transcendent. And somehow, against all odds, everything works out for the best. Funny, yet poignant in all the right places, PONTOON can't come more highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)