PONTOON: A Novel of Lake Wobegon
Garrison Keillor
Penguin
Fiction
Hardcover: 0670063568
Paperback: 9780143114109

“If there were no Lake Wobegon and all those loopy Lutherans living there to write about, someone would have had to invent it.” Huh???
 
Yes, that’s right. There are folks out there --- my quoted dear friend among them --- so captivated by Garrison Keillor’s three decades of enchanting tales from this little village in Norwegian Middle America that they believe it really exists. Honestly, they do! What higher compliment could an author possibly wish for?
 
And PONTOON, Keillor’s latest Lake Wobegon opus, makes matters of credibility even more challenging; the entire dust jacket displays all those places fans have visited over the years through his Prairie Home Companion radio readings. We begin, in fact, by reading a closed book…
 
There’s the Sons of Knute Temple anchoring the eastern end of Second Avenue along the lakeshore; directly south lies the Farmer’s Union Grain Elevator; directly across from that sits the imposing expanse of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church, flanked by school and rectory. You have to look over on the back cover to find the more diffident Lutheran church planted near the western end of Main Street. And in between are all the places that figure so large in the lives of Lake Wobegonians.
 
After a good 10 minutes spent poring over the delightful dust cover map, I finally got into the story and didn’t emerge again until the very end. That’s a typical Garrison Keillor experience. While it’s happening, you live entirely within this so-real little world of his that conjures up all the values, fears, foibles, eccentricities and just plain old-fashioned foolishness many of us long for in a world where the phrase “simple pleasures” has become an oxymoron.
 
Lake Wobegon has always been one of those places whose wildest characters unabashedly stand out and whose traditions are often surprisingly remolded around family milestones such as weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries and the like. In PONTOON the fast-paced, aggressive, high-tech urban world comes face to face with the equally intense but much more endearing complexities of a small community that simply cannot be intimidated by outside forces.
 
It all starts with the quite ordinary fact of an old lady dying quietly in her sleep while reading a book. But feisty and with-it Evelyn has left behind a major bombshell --- a will that specifies cremation (scandalous!) followed by the aerial dropping of her ashes into Lake Wobegon, encased in a hollowed-out emerald green bowling ball. Her correspondence files turn out to reveal even more surprising secrets, but I won’t spoil the fun by telling any.
 
Being the linear thinkers they are, however, the good (and not-so-good) Lutherans of the town quickly move past their initial shock. Various factions go about preparing their own “appropriate” goodbyes to Evelyn, amid the big and small crises of their own lives. Among them are her depressed alcoholic daughter and morally indecisive grandson, who dutifully work out the logistics of actually making the aerial bombardment a reality.
 
In the meantime, a prodigal daughter-made-good returns home with her boorish partner to stage a waterborne “commitment” ceremony aboard a local resident’s pontoon boat (hence the title), but finds herself sucked back into bittersweet memories and realities that mess up her urbanized plans for life. Boor leaves in a snit, creating even more interesting ripples in the plot.
 
The inimitable delight, as with any Keillor tale, is in the meshing and entangling of details that produce bizarre results and memorable, even cataclysmic, events. And they aren’t just of the slapstick genre that conjures up visions of chaos and confusion. In PONTOON, Keillor also delves more deeply into the psyche of characters whose inner and outer lives run on strangely dissonant parallel courses --- Evelyn’s more surprisingly than all the rest put together.
 
Suffice it to say that Garrison Keillor has practically reinvented the truism that appearances are deceiving. In his hands, the art of deception is made miraculous, even transcendent. And somehow, against all odds, everything works out for the best. Funny, yet poignant in all the right places, PONTOON can’t come more highly recommended.

   --- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)

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