From Eagle Lake (or, perhaps, Lake Wobegon): Some Comments about WLT: A Radio Romance, by Garrison Keillor
Early reviewers of Garrison Keillor’s novel WLT: A Radio Romance remarked that some admirers of A Prairie Home Companion and Lake Wobegon stories might be surprised, or even shocked, by this novel. That was enough to send me off, in due time — given general inertia, to my local branch of the London Public Library to read the book.
I should start by saying that I was fascinated by the historical detail in the book. Although I have spent most of my adult life in other countries, doing other things, the world Keillor describes was very much my world for about the first 25 years of my life. The place of my birth, Willmar, gets a few mentions, along with innumerable other places in Minnesota and adjoining states which I knew well. And, of course, there is much about Minneapolis. There are probably few Minnesotans younger than I who remember the ball park on Nicollet Avenue where the Minneapolis Millers played. Fewer still who know the names of the stops on the Great Northern Railroad going west out of Minneapolis. When Keillor is onto real historical descriptions, he is very good. This, in fact, is what kept me reading to the end. When he starts to invent, however, he tends to get rather silly — the Bathsheba Baptist Church? Indeed!
The problem to which those first reviewers were alluding is that there is just too much about sex in the book. Furthermore (the ultimate insult to a comic novel about sex), before long, it gets rather boring and tiresome. Much of what he drags out I think I heard at about age 13. I remember people with whom I worked in my youth in the packing plant in Sioux City, Iowa, who had a richness of vocabulary and inventive imagination that far surpassed Keillor’s in these matters.
What bothers me about all this is that it strikes a rather false note. Surely not everything we did, (let alone what we thought — perhaps particularly at Bible Camp), would have been appropriate to detail at the Covenant Church midweek service. However, we were not so obsessed with sex as Keillor’s characters seem to be. Indeed, I can remember quite a number of things that were on our minds.
What bothers me most about this false note, as I have called it, is my feeling that Keillor’s tone, unlike the tone in his delightful, ironic Lake Wobegon stories, here becomes rather like snickering or sneering at this world — from the exalted point of view of New York? For example, the gospel quartet who figure prominently in the book are unbelievable lechers and drunkards (to say nothing of other affectations). Well, I think some dose of realism is always in order, but having, in fact, sung in such quartets, I think it is all quite strained. I am sure there are, and have been, gospel singers who might have had their failings, but they were nothing like Keillor’s “Shepherds.”
I think that those of us who knew Minnesota in the ’30s, "40s, and ’50s, perhaps especially those of us whose tradition comes from what is now the Covenant Church, need our own historian. He or she should be someone who could view this world with a certain objectivity, aware of the humor and irony that such a study would require. There is, of course, something paradoxical in this tradition. Much of the impetus of the pietistic movement in Sweden (and later in North America) came from the conviction that there was something inconsistent in the actuel position of the Church of Sweden in that one could profess all sorts of true doctrine and yet be a gross sinner. Unfortunately, some of our ancestors neglected the lesson that we might have got from Martin Luther, that each of us is simul iustus et peccator, at one and the same time justified and a sinner. Anybody writing a history of these times would have to strike a delicate balance between the iustus and the peccator. I once thought that Garrison Keillor might have done such a thing. Alas, it will not do. We look for better.