Pontoon

"You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories..."

Master storyteller Garrison Keillor’s meandering yarn was clearly a build up for an epic comic catastrophe over the waters of – where else? – Lake Wobegon. And even though you could see it coming it was still hilarious beyond description. The audiobook could have ended with the last piano interlude since the epilogue didn’t really do much for the plot or the characters and was unexpectedly dark.

Gary Kellior hauled his industrial sized ass, one doublewide butt cheek at a time, up onto his protesting stool at the counter of the Chatterbox Diner and flipped open his notebook. And by his stool I mean HIS stool, the cracked and faded red leatherette had molded to the contours of his rear, wholesale sized but unwholesome in appearance, long since. It not only gave the top of the stool a deformed appearance, like a particularly poisonous mushroom, but made it acutely uncomfortable for anyone but Gary to perch on. This suited him.

Most seats, stools and especially booths at the Chatterbox are occupied on a time share basis, you slide in as your predecessor slides out, chow down, finish your coffee, leave a carefully calculated tip and show more then tag in your successor. Farm hands, store workers, writers even; everyone stops at the Chatterbox.

All watched carefully by Gary, sitting up there, slouched at the counter, eating pie, drinking coffee and writing, writing, writing. That whole notebook of his is just full of ideas and observations, even personal ones, even very personal ones, about the people in the Chatterbox and the town beyond. If the contents ever got out, he’d be lynched because he knows that if you’re writing about people, you’ve got to take the advent calendar approach – if you’re going to open up a door onto something private, there had better be something sweet to consume.

But this notebook contains the raw material that leads to that sweetness, and that can be bitter indeed.

Gary thinks that, by and large, the folk in Lake Wobegon fall into thee categories. There are those that are desperate to leave, driven out by the cold winters, or the boredom that settles on the place like drifting snow, or their neighbors. Then there are those that can’t understand why anyone would want to leave, either because they think anywhere else would be pretty much the same as Lake Woebegon, or at least no better, or they think that anywhere else is likely to be considerably worse, with the added drawback that you’ve had to go to the time, effort and expense of traveling to get there.

The third category is those who have left and who have come back. If they come back successful they are treated with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, if they came back unsuccessful, as the result of some juicy failure or disgrace, then they are regarded with a mixture of acute curiosity and suspicion laced with satisfaction.

Sometimes those that leave and come back manage to combine the two, making good by doing bad. One of the characters in Pontoon returns a success after establishing herself as the leading pet aromatherapist in Hollywood. In a place like Lake Wobegonon, alternative medicine has a bad enough reputation when administered for people (homeopathy having a poor record of effectiveness for traumatic injuries caused by carelessness around the threshing machinery) but for cats, it's madness and so a perfect example of the lunacy of out of towners.



Given that most of the characters consider that the default setting for a Lake Wobegoner is to consider Lake Wobegon okay and anywhere else probably terrible but not worth traveling to to have their suspicions confirmed, it’s fitting that one of the out-and-out villains of the story sells time-shares in private jets (occasional use of a private jet being a sensible alternative to owning one that will spend most of its time lurking expensively in a hanger). Private jets are, to a Lake Wobegoner, the worst kind mode of travel – not only do they allow you to leave home, but you can do it fast and without even traveling with others! How snooty is that?

This is a story of midwest America and it’s comforting when you are snowed in for half the year to read about home being best. And to be fair, Lake Wobegon is the sort of place that it’s pleasant to spend some time in, even if it is only for a few hundred pages. Just avoid the beady eye of the fat guy sitting up, taking notes, at the counter of the Chatterbox. show less

Over the years, I have only listened to Prairie Home Companion with half an ear, and I assumed it was a gentle bit of sweet down-home humor. If this book is any indication, I've been missing a lot of wickedly funny stuff, although I'm guessing that the radio show can't be quite as bawdy as this book sometimes is. In this book, a middle-aged alcoholic woman discovers that her late mother Evelyn led a racy secret life with a lover named Raoul. Even more shocking in Lake Wobegon, she was no longer an observant Lutheran, and her last wishes were for unusual funeral involving a bowling ball. Throw in pet aromatherapist from (of course) California, an Elvis impersonator, a hot air balloon and a couple of huge fiberglass ducks, and you have a show more laugh-out-loud entertainment with just a touch of redeeming social value. show less

I started this book as we drove home from a post-retirement trip to Louisiana knowing that we would be going through Minnesota at some point. Little did I realize how appropriate my choice of reading material was. Shortly after we headed west from Minneapolis I saw a sign for Lake Wobegon Trail and I realized that we were driving right through the area that Keillor writes about.

I've heard Keillor a few times and so I could imagine his voice as I read this book. His counterpart in Canada, Stuart McLean, has the same sort of style. Both of them are probably better listened to than read but once you have heard them enough times you can transplant their laconic delivery to the written page.

The book starts with the death of Evelyn in Lake show more Wobegon which occurred just as she had wished, suddenly in her bed after an evening of good food and laughs with good friends. Her death affects many other people in Lake Wobegon but perhaps no-one as much as her daughter Barbara who discovered her body. Barbara has been drinking too much and letting her house go but with the death of her mother she has an epiphany. She learns her mother had a lover that she would go away on trips with but she never let anyone know. The lover, Raoul, was her boyfriend in 1941 but then he was called away to service and she married someone else. They reconnected when they were in their 60s and had a wonderful time together. Barbara decides that she will learn from this to enjoy her life but do it openly.

The end of the book is given over to Evelyn's memorial service which is as outlandish as you can imagine and then some. It takes place on the lake and involves pontoon boats, parasails, hot air balloons, odiferous dogs etc. It's worth reading the book just to get to that chapter. show less

Another pretty good Garrison Keillor novel about the good folk of Lake Wobegon. Keillor seems to have arrived at a favorite formula: Delve a bit into the lives and hidden dreams of some of the Lake Wobegon denizens, maybe have one of them act on a long-buried dream and dredge up all manner of old submerged hurts and pettinesses, wind up with a major town activity gone slapsticky awry (in this case, a burial at Lake Wobegon of cremation ashes stowed inside a bowling ball from aloft by a parasailer. I think three or four of Keillor's books have followed this pattern. But never mind, it's a nice pattern that I enjoy now and again.

Keillor impresses the hell out of with this creative, original word play and droll humour that seems to spring effortlessly, naturally, and eternally as resident historian and reported of Lake Woebegone. Parts of this reminds me of what I like most of Tom Robbins. Keillor, however, so constantly and continually spins ou tthe witticisms that at times it threatens to be tiring - I just have to set the book down for a bit and savor before I forget the impressions...

Hmmm. I think Keillor's schtick is getting old. Either that or he's writing too much and the quality control suffers. Maybe he has bills to pay. Whatever, this was a most disappointing book. Keillor's schtick, for those who don't know, is to chronicle the doings of people in a dull hick town in Minnesota, wringing comedy from their very ordinary lives with sharp observation and dry wit. Remove the laughs, as in this book, and what you have is a litany of rather depressing life stories, each one a born loser. After about three of these, and only half a laugh in the lot, I got the feeling that this was not one of Mr. Keillor's best. Worse was yet to come, because, as was apparent almost from the start, he had in store for us a Grand show more Finale of unlikely farce. There are two problems with this; 1) farce is rarely very funny, and this one was no exception, and 2) unlikely farce sits very badly in Lake Wobegon, a town where nothing exciting or unusual ever happens. That's the whole Wobegon joke, and if you undermine that whole Wobegonian ethos for the sake of some cheap gags, what's left?

Verdict: one Norwegian bachelor farmer out of five. show less