Woebegone Boy by Garrison KeillorFaber & Faber305pp. £16.99 in UK
Woe, be gone! Yes, indeed. The most cheering characteristic of Garrison Keillor's fiction is its persuasive declaration that there is such a thing as human decency. While continuing his unrelenting satirical campaign against bullshit, his new novel asserts that filial loyalty to the virtues of the much-derided American heartland can enable true love to prevail. He performs this difficult literary balancing act with stylishness and many a chuckle.
As in his other beguilingly humorous works to date, Wobegon Boy is essentially earnest, drawing upon Keillor's early years in rural Minnesota and his urban adventures in radio and beyond.
This material again proves to be plenty, connecting the basics of family life with the complexities of passage into the opportunities and stresses of independent adulthood. Keillor successfully invests the particulars of his experience with universal meaning. Who can't share his mixed feelings about home and leaving home? He and his fictional alter ego once again escape from the security and constriction of youth in a small town; and, once they are in the clear, they feel pangs of anxiety and nostalgia.
So here is the story of one John Tollefson, descendant of a Norwegian, "a cheerful stoic", sho migrated to Lake Wobegon, in the Middle West, and "settled on land that reminded him of Norway, forgetting that he had left Norway because the land was so poor". John, too, in his forties, has long been gone from his austere place of origin, yet still cherishes it. He wishes he had adequately expressed filial love before returning home for his father's funeral. A long section of the novel is devoted to the death, burial and wake. The warmth of the tragedy and comedy of these scenes makes Wobegon seem remarkably Celtic.
Keillor is forever protecting himself against the danger that readers may suspect him of soft-heartedness. He describes mourners weeping: "Diana cried beautifully, crooning, as women do, but men are awful; they don't get the practice, and when they do cry, it sounds like an animal caught on barbed wire."
On the very next page, John stops his tears by remembering a joke "about Ole and Svend coming home and finding Lena in bed with the mailman . . . Ole and Svend get beers out of the refrigerator and sit down in the kitchen and drink them, and finally Svend says, "What about the mailman?" and Ole says, "Let him get his own beer."
Keillor's delight in word-play enables him to serve up truisms with brand-new aphoristic polish - "Life is too short and precious to waste time treating a great romance as if it were a chemistry experiment, watching to see if it might eventually turn sour"; "Somehow, instead of simplifying people's lives, technology had managed only to speed up the rate of harassment"; "You don't know what misery is until you find yourself in bed with an angry woman."
John suffers major setbacks on his way to happy fulfilment. Campus politics defeats him. As the manager of a college radio station, he wants to broadcast classical music, but the dean demands talk-shows. John anticipates programmes such as the "Gay-Lesbian Parenting Hour" and "People in Search of Closure" and resigns, but not quite fast enough to avoid being fired.
Inspired by Wobegonian corn, he plans a vegetarian restaurant, and suffers from a builder's extravagance and a lawyer's ineptitude. He fears that loving the lawyer's sister will come to nothing, though another woman encourages him to believe in himself. "You're straight," she tells him, "you're single, you're sober, you bathe regularly, and you talk in complete sentences. There's a million women looking for you right now."
In Lake Wobegon, "all the Norwegians were Lutherans, of course, even the atheists - it was a Lutheran God they did not believe in . . .". However, John retrospectively finds consolation in the enforced conformity of his boyhood. "The advantage of a restrictive Lutheran upbringing is that it heightens the pleasure of love when you eventually get around to it."
Wobegon Boy eventually grows up, and many readers will share his pleasure.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic