Just a short mention today of a recently published book, not particularly literary and not a landmark in any way, but still a book I would had to read as soon as I saw it.
Ever since Lake Woebegon Days, I have read every Garrison Keillor book that comes along. It wouldn’t be fair to call Lake Woebegon an industry, but certainly, the creation of radio show and film and seven or eight books, shows that for many people the small Minnesotan town has a charm which gets under the skin.
Admittedly, the formula sometimes creaks a little. The previous book in the series, Pontoon, did little for me, but the latest volume, Liberty shows a return to form, which kept me amused for a couple of days and reminded me why I started to read Keillor in the first place.
In Liberty we read about Clint Bunsen and his preparations for the Fourth of July parade. Clint chairs the planning committee and anyone who has ever sat on a committee will recognise Keillor’s grasp of the painful and frustrating proceedings which beset all such gatherings. Clint has been fairly successful in previous years in cutting out such traditional events as the parade of tractors, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and the Ladies Sextette riding in the fire-truck and singing “Its a Grand Old Flag”. But he has found to his cost that personal success means that,
- people resent you for it
- expect you to do it again
- watch for signs of pride on your part, and,
- await your debacle with cheerful anticipation.
—–
However, Clint is deterimined that this years parade is the best ever, and pushes through all objections to organise an event like no year’s before. However, unknown to anyone (at least to begin with) he has fallen in love with Angelica, a truly loose cannon, a woman half his age, and has agreed that she can come up from California to dress up as the Statue of Liberty and ride in the parade.
This could all be a bit farcical but as usual, the story is interleaved with the usual philosophical musings of the main characters, in this case Clint and his wife Irene. In Keillor’s world, people learn from their experiences, and hardship leads to insightful reflections on life and relationships. We somehow know that despite people’s stupidity and self-delusion, they will ultimately see sense and find some sort of peace in their less that perfect worlds.
The only problem with this book as with all the later Woebegon novels is that none of them quite live up to the promise of the first. Lake Woebegon Days is a classic of American humorous fiction which sits well among titles by writers from Mark Twain to Carl Hiaasen. In some ways it would have been best to leave at that, but for those like myself who have a nostalgic memory of their pleasure in reading Lake Woebegone, these later volumes will just have to do.
