In Garrison Keillor’s newest novel, Boom Town, we return to Lake Wobegon, famous from decades of monologues on the classic radio show A Prairie Home Companion.

**Available in Hardcover, Audiobook, and eReader formats**

Lake Wobegon is having a boom year thanks to millennial entrepreneurship—AuntMildred’s.com Gourmet Meatloaf, for example, or Universal Fire, makers of artisanal firewood seasoned with sea salt. Meanwhile, the author flies in to give eulogies at the funerals of five classmates, including a couple whom he disliked, and he finds a wave of narcissism crashing on the rocks of Lutheran stoicism. He is restored by the humor and grace of his old girlfriend Arlene and a visit from his wife, Giselle, who arrives from New York for a big love scene in an old lake cabin.

 

Praise for Boom Town:

“Wonderfully over-the-top. Blisteringly funny, acute, and true. Keillor’s speaking to us with encouragement and empathy about the American life. But at the same time, he’s got our number that way he’s always had it. This book is a tonic.” —Richard Ford

 

“You can’t go home again unless you’re Garrison Keillor and home is Lake Wobegon. Then, of course, it is imperative that you do so—and we are fortunate indeed to tag along and share in the final chapter of the most fascinating and compelling characters ever conjured from the most vivid imagination of America’s greatest storyteller!

In Boom Town, we are invited to catch up as Garrison gets caught up with all of those beautifully flawed human beings that populate and promulgate their mythical town where all the women are finally accounted for, all the men are self-realized or died trying, and all the children are still way above average.” —Martin Sheen

 

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Here're your orders: make something beautiful

I woke up this morning and my good woman wasn’t gone, she was asleep beside me, I didn’t feel an aching in my head, no blues around my bed. I made coffee, it tasted fine, not like turpentine. I could put gin in the coffee and make it taste like turpentine but why would I? And that’s how I feel about the Six Supremes who’re trying to take us back to the 19th century. No need to grieve over it, November is coming, and the simple solution is to throw the bums out. Elect a Congress with a two-thirds majority in favor of enlarging the Court to fifteen, which will reverse the reversals. Ninety million eligible voters sat out the 2016 election and that’s how we wound up where we are with this ambitious minority in power. So you’re depressed by this turn of events. Think of the Six, staying home with the shades pulled, their spouses and children going to the hair salon accompanied by plainclothesmen with a bulge under the jacket. They know that they are widely despised. They avoid eye contact with passersby. I doubt they’re ordering takeout: some worker at Domino’s sees Alito’s name on the order, she is likely to tamper with the pizza. The Six are not attending concerts. No picnics for them. No long car trips except to Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Clarence and Ginni surely have close friends but after he announced that the Supremes should take a hard look at gay relationships and contraceptives, he must be thinking about the children and grandchildren of the friends, the boy with his hair in a bun, the girl with the tattoos, and what about the paperboy and the waiters at the country club? And what if he takes a wrong turn and runs into the Pride Parade? They might put him on a rainbow blanket and march down the street tossing him in the air, waving his arms and legs, a ridiculous fate for the Leader of the Pack. You and I, my dears, can walk freely through town with a clear conscience, enjoy the breeze in the trees and say hi to the cop on the corner. The Six cannot. The cop is not so friendly, imagining everybody carrying a loaded .45 and if he sees one of the six enablers, he might give them the finger, which so far is protected by the First Amendment. Don’t be disheartened. Deal with the problem. If you’re troubled by inflation, cut back on expenses. Don’t buy sparkling water. Fill up the glass with tap water and if you want bubbles, stick a straw in the water and blow. If you’re depressed by the state of things, skip the news and take a walk beside a large body of water and look at the stars and the moon. The newscaster will say, “Good evening” and then give you fifty-seven reasons why it’s not. Give yourself a break. The Gang of Six is heading for 1845 and I doubt they’ll get to Prohibition before they fade into the sunset and go down in the WWTT chapter of history (What Were They Thinking). The Six couldn’t find abortion mentioned in the Constitution so they dumped Roe but maybe when they go to their physician to deal with their gloominess, they’ll find a medical originalist with a bucket of leeches who’ll bleed them white and administer powerful purgatives until they’re considerably lighter, and thus they will regain their senses and so will we. Meanwhile, remind yourself that other people have thrived under wretched governors so don’t be discouraged. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar threw Bach in jail for daring to think he had individual rights. Dante was sent into exile and he wrote the Inferno so he could put the politician Argenti into the Fifth Circle of Hell. Dostoevsky joined a liberal study group for which, in 1849, he was thrown into prison and sentenced to death by firing squad, and was third in line to be executed when a pardon arrived. He lit out for Paris, London, Berlin, and figured out how to survive, writing Crime and Punishment in serial installments for magazines, avoiding politics. While cruelty is in power, do what Mozart did. Exercise your gifts. Create beautiful things. Wolfgang stayed clear of emperors and did his work and he lives on today and the emperors are just moldy names on marble slabs covered with pigeon droppings. If you can’t write The Marriage of Figaro, write your own marriage and make it a work of art.  

America is missing a holiday maybe

It’s over and gone, but every Midsummer Day I remember the dinner at Hanne and Ole’s farm in Denmark back in 1989 when fifty of us sat in a meadow at long tables with white cloths and good china for a feast of cold soup and salad and white wine, platters of lamb and potatoes, and dessert and coffee, and the Danish lady next to me speaking perfect schoolgirl English, and around ten p.m., as the sky turned dark, we traipsed down to the ocean shore and lit a bonfire and burned a straw witch and all the Danes sang from memory songs they’d known from childhood and we could see far away up the shore, other bonfires, other parties, other witches being burned.

We have no celebration like it in America. There’s no commercial motive behind Midsummer’s Day, no political rationale or religious, it’s about the glory of summer and friendship and the casting out of evil spirits. I was there as an outsider, and in celebration of the day they went out of their way to make me feel welcome. The Danish lady had heard that I was an American author and she read a book of mine and talked about it, which, my being a self-effacing Midwesterner, made me uncomfortable but it was a kind gesture.

Maybe the Fourth could become that sort of celebration. We need some community parties that have a good feeling without a big message. The boomers went in for big music festivals, Woodstock and then the Grateful Dead concerts, thirty thousand people in tribal clothing, seriously stoned, listening to a stoned band on a distorted sound system vamping for twenty-five minutes on a song that was better at four and a half. The Dead concert was not about community, it was about who was not welcome, your parents, teachers, people over thirty.

I attended a strawberry fest once and that was a fine celebration. You pop a big ripe red strawberry in your mouth and you feel your meanness dissipate. That’s why strawberry-rhubarb pie is such a great innovation, combining sweetness and irony. It is a beautiful marriage and marriage, as we know, is the basis of community and the true test of character. The Deadheads were under the drug-induced illusion that they were lonely geniuses, but when old friends and neighbors gather to celebrate, it’s a triumph of hope over experience.

Denmark is a nation of a dozen political parties so you knew there was plenty of stiff disagreement under the surface and, as in any group of people who know each other all too well, various old feuds and misunderstandings and interesting gossip, but they set it aside when the witch is carried in on her pole and consigned to the flames. Let go of the past, summer is here, live these brilliant days one by one, put regret and recrimination behind.

Marriage is a great test and some of us were allowed to retake it until we got it right. To make a life with your most knowledgeable critic is heroic, and the reward is a spacious happiness, no doubt about it. I have no objection to same-sex marriage but it strikes me as a compromise, whereas marrying someone from the other team is a bold move. My parents eloped and married in secret over the opposition of both families and this was a bond between them, they were in love to the very end, though they were as different as could be, a farm boy and a city girl, a stoic and a romantic. My mother loved comedians and laughed at Jack Benny and Lucille Ball and my dad didn’t understand comedy, it struck him as contrary to Scripture. She adored Christmas, he thought it was a pagan aberration, but they worked it out.

And now Jenny walks into the room and asks what I’m writing and she’s going to want me to read it to her and when I do, she’s going to tell me to take out the part about same-sex marriage, that it’ll hurt people’s feelings, but I’m not going to do it. Some of my best friends, et cetera, et cetera, and if you can’t kid your friends, then we have a problem. She and I have been together thirty years and she still mystifies me. We could make Columbus Day into Couples Day: marriage is a voyage into the unknown and when you get there you find out it’s not where you thought you were going, thank goodness.

A weekend in the wilds of Connecticut

I have seen some of the future lately and I must admit it’s very appealing to me. My wife drives through Connecticut, a woman’s voice in the dashboard directing her along a twisting route through small towns laid out in the 18th century, a street plan designed to frustrate intruders, and my daughter in the back seat FaceTimes her roommate Saamiya who is in India, visiting relatives. My daughter is drawn to people, loves to be in a group, and the phone is her instrument of choice, and soon Marisa joins from London, and Erin in New Jersey, Hindu, Orthodox, and Jewish, joined in small talk. Remarkable to me, not to her.

“Can you feel how smooth the car runs?” my wife says. She took it to a garage for an oil change two days ago and the garage texted her videos of two very worn tires and an engine that needed retuning and she texted back her consent. The cost was steep but the advance info lessened the shock. I wish I’d been at the marketing meeting that came up with that idea.

We come to her family’s old summer house and turn on the AC and I attend to my email, fifty deletions, four replies, and then I post on Facebook a comment on the benefits of being a cancelee in this cancel culture (you find out who your true friends are) that is read and liked by 494 persons. I like this. Back in my day, I could’ve written a letter to the editor of the morning paper about public shaming and friendship, and maybe it would’ve appeared four days later, and maybe two friends would’ve said, “I saw your letter to the editor.” But now, having written three sentences, I find out in a few hours that 494 persons have friendly feelings toward me. A gentle rain on the roof.

How many friends does a person need? Thousands? No, 494 makes me happy. My wife sits on the porch reading an e-book borrowed from the library and then she comes in to show me, on her iPhone, video of the family of foxes cavorting in the woods a hundred feet away. The FaceTiming continues. My wife loves this porch because she sat here with her grandfather and grandmother when she was a little girl. She and her siblings were parceled out singly to the old folks, each kid feeling special in turn. She was cherished on this porch, by the old folks and now again by me. A fox trots across the lawn. Saamiya speaks from India. A general blessedness is in the air.

Other people can dread the future persuasively, and God bless them, but I imagine a world in which people feel drawn together by digital democracy and find a humane commonality, in which life is made simpler in small crucial ways, and meanwhile medicine continues to take great leaps. In two months I shall have a mitral valve replaced by an ace surgical team, most of them half my age, which, assuming success, which of course I do, opens the door to my reaching the age of 97, my mother’s ultimate age, or 101, my editor Roger Angell’s, which would let me see more of the future than I was counting on, a very happy thought.

I’ve been a writer since my mitral valve problem got me excused from football when I was 14 and instead of enduring humiliation at the hands of bigger boys, I wrote sports for the Anoka Herald and my aunt Eleanor read my stuff and said it was good. My parents believed that praising their children would encourage the sin of pride so they didn’t but my aunt took it as her auntly duty, and she was my most athletic aunt and most literate, and she was a force in my life. I’ve never gone to a shrink, I just sit down and write, and this is a gift, along with the blood thinner and the anti-seizure meds and the woman on the porch.

So I’ve canceled my 80th birthday party in August, to which I would’ve invited all 494 of you, because I don’t want COVID to get in the way of the valve replacement that can send me tap-tap-tapping into my nineties. I’m a happy man of simple tastes. If you offered me some super sex, I’d be happy with the soup.

 

Just a word about Sunday, then I shut up

Father’s Day is a wonderful joke, a day on which you sit with your brood and someone turns to you and says, “When is Father’s Day? Isn’t it in June?” and you, the father, say, “I have no idea whatsoever.” And that’s the end of it. Mother’s Day is the big deal when tanker ships full of French perfume dock at the bottling plants and four-star restaurants hire extra staff and Father’s Day is the Sunday when someone gives you a bottle of cologne that smells like disinfectant. The price tag is still on it, $1.89.

Women, as we know unless we’re in Texas or in the memory unit, run this world. There was never a single object that a man set down that a woman didn’t reach over and move it. Never a sentence came out of a man’s mouth that a woman didn’t correct. Women decide what we shall eat and what we shall sit on or sleep on, and a man’s opinion is of no more use than that of the family cat. This is a major factor in the popularity of gay marriage: two men decide they want to be free and sleep on cotton sheets and not polyester and have dark brown towels and wear festive colors rather than the prison uniforms women buy for us. The sex is an add-on, mainly it’s about exercising personal taste.

I know, I grew up in a women’s world, the kitchen, and it was great fun. These were Midwestern Christian women but once they got loose of their men, they were funny and loved cooking and tidying up, while the men did the hard work, which was conversing with their sons-in-law.

So don’t give me any cologne, my darlings. Honor your mother who endured excruciating misery and the cruel hands of male obstetricians while your old man watched TV and ate Chinese takeout.

I’m not the man my father John was. He built the house I grew up in, dug the basement, poured concrete, raised the walls, did the plumbing, planted a lawn and garden. I find it challenging to put up a pup tent on flat ground. He was a farm boy. I was a compulsive reader. I put in my time hoeing corn but I gravitated to a nest under the stairs where I read novels and poetry. To my father it was almost as if I were styling around in high heels and nylons. I regret the unhappiness I caused him. We never bonded until he was dying and I brought my little daughter to see him and they bonded instantly, she delighted him, and I got in on her ticket.

Things are different now. Traveling around last week, in and out of airports, it was touching to observe the gentleness of young fathers with small children, their sweetness and patience, a far cry from the brusque tyrants of old. In my boyhood, daddies weren’t cuddlers, they were the warden, chief critic, executive, and it was beautiful to see up close a young dad with a weepy infant in arms and two rambunctious toddlers, speaking kindly to his offspring as he installed them in a row, comforting, encouraging, coaxing. Back in my day, dads were enforcers of high standards to which their children aspired but inevitably failed leaving an embittered pater consoling himself with a bottle of Scotch, and now a loving style of fatherhood predominates. This bodes well for humanity.

Nonetheless, it strikes me as wasteful to set aside a Sunday in June to honor ejaculation. Put fatherhood together with motherhood for Mom & Dad Day in May and maybe start a new day in June in honor of underlings, minions, employees, offspring, in recognition of the fact that leaders learn from people below them on the organization chart. Many clerks have brought up their bosses to be decent human beings. I’ve learned a great deal from fan letters, e.g., what they omit. There is nothing so instructive as standing in front of a group of people you’re supposed to teach. You learn about comedy from listening to the laughter. Parenting skills are taught by small children.

Maybe on Underling Day you’d turn society upside down and put the inmates in charge of the asylum. I don’t know. When I divorced his mother, my son, who was seven, said, “Why can’t you and Mom take turns being right?” I still haven’t answered that question.

 

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