|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Show more editions and formats
Show fewer editions and formatsBetter Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor  (12)
$11.20
|
Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (34)
$17.13
|
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor  (53)
|
The Book of Guys: Stories by Garrison Keillor  (19)
|
Happy to Be Here by Garrison Keillor (4)
|
A decade after he first explored the small-town precincts of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor makes a comical return to his roots. Not that Wobegon Boy takes place entirely within Mist County. The narrator, John Tollefson, made an early exit from his hometown and has spent the last 20 years managing a college radio station in upstate New York. Here he seems to have put a healthy distance between himself and his Wobegonian past.
For the author, John's job is a handy pulpit, allowing him to fulminate against radio, New Age affectation, and campus politicking. Keillor remains a master of the cantankerous one-liner, yet there's a romance here, too--between John and a historian named Alida Freeman. And while Keillor can't resist roping Alida into his own pan-Scandinavian schtick--she's writing a scholarly study of a 19th-century Norwegian neuropath who administered high colonics to Lincoln himself--the love story is genuinely touching and gives the novel an extra emotional ballast.
So, too, does the magnetic pull of Lake Wobegon. John keeps describing life back in Minnesota as one long exercise in sensory (and emotional) deprivation: "We were not brought up to experience pleasure, so it doesn't register with us, like writing on glass with a pencil. Dullness is our stock-in-trade, dullness honed to its keenest edge." Nonetheless, he returns twice in the course of the novel, and his sojourns among the Lutherans are the source of not only comedy but home truths.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Keillor himself reads the story of John Tollefson as he collides with the craziness outside his home town. Last seen leaving Minnesota in Lake Wobegon Days, Tollefson is now moving into a new passage: a job with a National Public Radio station in upstate New York, a misbegotten restaurant with some leftover hippie partners, and a wonderful new college professor girlfriend. Despite his new experiences, he seems to be moving toward a mid-life crisis when he returns to Lake Wobegon for the funeral of his eccentric and delightful father. Somber as this all sounds, Keillor's hilarious, dead-pan observations are woven throughout. NPR and colleges?such as the one for students with financially gifted parents?come in for some especially fun skewering. For all audio collections.?Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|