Lake Wobegon Days

Dispatches from where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are above-average
Famous for his Prairie Home Companion monologues on public radio, Garrison Keillor’s voice is one of the most recognizable in contemporary culture. His lilt is synonymous with Lake Wobegon, the imaginary Minnesota town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.”

The reoccurring characters, local landmarks and contextualization of history make it hard to believe that Lake Wobegon is a purely invented place. Keillor’s attention to both private experience and public citizenry has established him as a preeminent teller of tales, a mythmaker of the finest quality: colloquial, nostalgic, honest. Lake Wobegon Days is brimming with recognizable tableaux, like the boy with whom the book opens, “kicking an asphalt chunk ahead of him, a chunk that after four blocks he’s now mesmerized by, to which he is completely devoted.”

By lovingly rendering the quotidian lives of Lake Wobegon’s inhabitants, Keillor is able to indirectly write about Life with a capital “L” — its cyclical nature revealed in a reverence for seasons, its conflict portrayed in the religious antagonism between the town’s European settlers, its joy depicted in the whims of the anonymous children who play in the street at dusk.

The Whippets baseball team, the tuna hotdish from the Chatterbox Café, the Norwegian ice fishing farmers… these features feel not only real but as if they belong to us. Keillor’s dreamy tales are enchanting: a collective paean to a golden era protracted into the present. Lake Wobegon with its “one traffic light, which is almost always green,” is a temporary distraction from the chaos in which we all now live. Slow and syrupy — but not too sweet — Garrison narrates the goings-on of his sleepy, all-American community with an intimate, funny and deeply human tone.