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John Tollefson left home 20 years ago and is beginning to suspect that was a mistake. Having broken through the "40" barrier, he enters a state of midlife questioning, accentuated by hassles at his work as manager of a public-radio station, financial instability resulting from a problematic investment, and uncertainties about the long-term prospects of his relationship with a woman with whom he is smitten.
So he makes two trips home: first, to escape the temptation to infidelity while his lover is in Denmark, and then for his father's funeral. His hometown restores his sense of values and stimulates reflection on mortality. There is no shortage of deaths for him to meditate on, from the sudden death of his father on the basement stairs holding a bag of frozen peas, to Richard Hansen's fatal crash after a truck accidentally spills a load of bananas onto the road in front of him, or Jim Tuomey's murder in a muddy farmyard in the middle of the night, wearing only a paper hospital gown.
All this high drama makes for good comedy, because John's hometown is Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor's fictional creation that represents the moral center of the American Midwest. It has been ten years since the last annals of life in Lake Wobegon were published. Lake Wobegon Days (1985) outlined the history of the town, describing its citizens and their exploits. Leaving Home (1987) gathered tales of how the strong women, good-looking men, and above-average children filled their quiet weeks in the Minnesota backwater. Now Wobegon Boy combines the concerns of both these books by zooming in on John Tollefson, who appeared as an awkward adolescent in the first novel.
Despite being a 300-hundred-page sprawl with oral roots, Wobegon Boy hangs together. In fact, it works even for those who are not devotees of Lake Wobegon. For the aficionado, there are walk-on appearances by familiar friends, hilarious one-liners, and the requisite tall tales. Still, our comprehensively unheroic hero complains, "I have no coherent story to my life. I am part of no struggle, have nothing at stake. … My only story is my childhood back in Lake Wobegon."
Keillor has been chided for creating a town insulated from modern realities; we don't meet any real-estate entrepreneurs, for example. One of the questions on "Post to the Host" at the Prairie Home Companion Web site was why there were no gays in Lake Wobegon. The characters in the stories are loosely sketched and are slightly altered according to the needs of the story. It is no big deal if 40-year-old John Tollefson does not quite square with the teenager Johnny. (I could have sworn, for example, that John was a blood relative of Val Tollefson, the somewhat sanctimonious Lutheran deacon who features in several of the early tales. Val does not even rate a mention in Wobegon Boy.) The one stable character is Lake Wobegon itself. It is what it is, as the tautologous town motto proclaims, and its significance would be altered if it were to be updated by having a multicultural center built beside the grain elevator or high-rise condos at the lake shore.
Keillor assumes that readers are already familiar with Lake Wobegon, and so by page six young Tollefson has departed for New York State—a letdown for the many who would like to linger in the fictional town. This is not the story of a Wobegon boyhood but of the rest of the life of a Wobegon boy. An apt subtitle might be "Lake Wobegon confronts postmodernity."
For John Tollefson to fit credibly into contemporary society, he needs to be partially reinvented so that he is linked to Wobegon mores but stands in a neutral relation to the factions and personalities of the town. He has to merge convincingly into modern life, thus depriving Keillor of a favorite comic device, namely, recognizing Wobegonians out of their home environment by giveaways of appearance, manner, and behavior. Still, this approach allows Keillor to display another side of his humor: the precisely modulated satire and deadpan urbanity characteristic of his New Yorker articles and essay collections.
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