Garrison Keillor–public radio personality, sage of Lake Wobegon, and successful writer–is a performer, these days, grown increasingly stale. Back in the early 1980s, as A Prairie Home Companion moved from cult favorite to broad popularity, Keillor’s blend of gentle satire and wistful illuminations seemed attractive and unique. But repetition leads to death, and in American Radio Company, his present Saturday-evening variety show, the same old cute menu has become tired and cliched–more tales from the town that time forgot, more little jokes about Minnesotans and New Yorkers, more good-timey songs and skits–all served up by a host who’s lately shown signs of restiveness. Keillor seems to have become increasingly bored and cynical pandering to an audience that wants a show as similar to those that preceded it as a daily comic strip and just as reliably comfortable.
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Not a bad-sounding project. You hope, maybe, for a funny, cutting story, one that reveals something interesting about the depths of Garrison Keillor the man while satirizing the restrictions he labors under as a performer. Well, if that’s what you hope for, too bad. The sensibilities animating the satire and rebellion here are unfortunately rather like those of a prepubescent boy. Rather than the earthy humor he seems to aim for, we get juvenescent raunch and bathroom jokes start to finish. In the end even the vision of degradation is compromised, by the creation of a character whose purity of spirit enables him to achieve stardom without soiling his soul–a character whose existence can only be seen as a self-serving justification of Keillor’s own career. If these are the man’s depths, then I’d rather he stuck to superficialities.
WLT’s subtitle is a play on words–Keillor’s novel encompasses a romance with radio as well as a love story involving one of the characters. It’s the tale of a radio station, WLT–With Lettuce and Tomato–more or less accidentally begun by brothers Ray and Roy Soderbjerg as an adjunct to their restaurant. Seventy-five pages in, the book’s hero enters: Francis With, a shy boy from North Dakota who gets into radio through his Uncle Art, changes his name to Frank White, becomes the station’s gofer, has adventures, finally gets the girl he loves, goes on to fame and fortune as a TV newscaster, and lives happily ever after. But that’s just a running subplot. There’s a panoply of other characters and a few other themes.
WLT is not much as a novel. Everyone in it who recounts a story (an oft-used device in the book) sounds an awful lot like Garrison Keillor doing the same on his radio show. Characters are defined through idiosyncrasies (like Marjery’s scatological hijinks) and never developed beyond that–a procedure that can work OK in the sketches Keillor is used to delivering but that gets tedious in a novel.
WLT: A Radio Romance by Garrison Keillor, Viking, $19.95.
