[In the following review, Gray states that, "At their best these stories are contemporary folk tales of American comic-karma … [a]t their worst many of these stories are like honey-coated breakfast cereal."]

For years I have listened to National Public Radio's evening news program "All Things Considered," and often on Saturdays I would forget that it was cut from 90 to 60 minutes to make room for a show called "A Prairie Home Companion." Not being one to turn off my radio until I'm outright offended, I passively left it on, and that's how Garrison Keillor slowly crept into my life. He seemed if not a remedy to the news at least a soft escape, an alternative to a third martini. Like Mr. Keillor, I perform monologues myself for a living, so I would often force myself to stay tuned through all that tacky sexless music to try to find out why that golden voice was, if not better than, then at least more popular than mine.

To be both true to yourself and at the same time capture the American imagination was something for me both feared and desired. So after my second martini I would sit back in a proper receptive haze and begin to listen. But always somewhere at the beginning, just after Garrison Keillor got warmed up, my girlfriend, Renée, would charge into the room yelling, "Turn that garbage off! It makes me want to swear!" Then she'd threaten to throw my little KLH radio out the window and the whole broadcast would be wiped out by our great traditional Saturday night fight—me defending Garrison Keillor by saying things like, "But Renée, he's not all good. I hear he chain-smokes Camel regulars." By the time we thrashed it out, his monologue was over.

But all is not lost. Having missed the monologues on the radio, I've been able to catch up with them in book form and read them all with a flashlight under the sheets before Renée came to bed. In fact, I recommend that you read Leaving Home just that way because these are perfect bedtime stories. They are exactly the right length and mood to put you out at the end and not in the middle, so you can slip off with a well-rounded sense of joyful completion. Also, I was surprised to find that these little stories about the people of the mythical town of Lake Wobegon are not as much like milk toast as I had anticipated. They are primarily wholesome American images that often begin with a description of local weather and glide through a landscape of meat loaf, roasted wieners, homemade jam and unconditional love, all falling cozily into place like a Norman Rockwell painting. But they are also perversely peppered with such contrasting earthy items as the autoignition of flatulence, cutting the heads off chickens, cancer and 68 dead pigs all on their backs with their legs turned up toward the sun.

At their best these stories are contemporary folk tales of American comic-karma, always demonstrating that you reap what you sow. Each detail collapses onto another, and as with Rube Goldberg, Uncle Wiggily or James Thurber, the stories all fall together like a row of dominoes, leaving you more with a memory of motion than of content. When these tales work, as they often do, they are like American Zen, about "sweet single-minded people" who work when they work and eat when they sit down to eat. Many of these monologues echo Thoreau's idea of salvation through simplicity, that "we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life."

At their worst many of these stories are like honey-coated breakfast cereal. They give you a sugar rush only to let you crash by midmorning. I realize they are pure fantasy, but that doesn't bother me so much as the style of the fantasy. They ring of a kind of apolitical false naïveté; they are a throwback to a time when America was genuinely innocent. In the face of America's contemporary complexities, the realities of Lake Wobegon seem stupefying, cloistering and overripe.

Somewhere under that overstuffed, hometown patchwork quilt I keep hearing someone screaming, "Help, I can't breathe! Let me out of here! Someone get me to the coast!" Everyone seems to be protected by living so far inland. America's worst traumas can be glimpsed only through the hazy mediation of their television tubes, a feeling poignantly expressed in "Aprille," one of my favorite stories. It is a beautifully constructed piece that reads like a perfect little sermon, about a girl who is about to be confirmed in the local Lutheran church. Suddenly, "she turned on the TV and lost her faith. Men in khaki suits were beating people senseless, shooting them with machine guns, throwing the bodies out of helicopters…. And she thought, 'This could happen here.'"

As with all movements in the realm of nostalgia—the longing for the thing that never happened—a sort of whitewash occurs here. That kind of cover-up often provokes the unchosen to hurl their radios out the window. As I read these stories I can't help wanting to lift the rug to see the other truth underneath. Perhaps Mr. Keillor's art would have been enough if he hadn't written such a tantalizing introduction, which for me proved to be the most interesting part of the book.

It's in this introduction, "A Letter From Copenhagen," that he expresses a more vital autobiographic truth and discusses his historic impulses as a storyteller, his disenchantment with Minneapolis and how he has rediscovered his sense of smell by giving up smoking after 24 years, along with details of his relocation in Copenhagen, another white homogeneous northern climate where, he tells us, eating corn is better than sex. I like Garrison Keillor when he talks about his "real" life. The only part I missed and wanted to hear more about was his personal reaction to what he calls "the collapse of an American career," and how he decided to walk away from so many years of a successful radio show.

There is an old saying, "Happy people don't make history." I have a feeling Mr. Keillor is more than happy, he's content. He has not left home but rather carries it with him in the form of a fertile imagination. I am sure he can't go home again. But I only wonder what he plans to do in Denmark. Whatever it is, it will have to be something new. There's no doubt in my mind that he has written one side of himself to completion. I'd love one day to read the other side, what he really feels about Copenhagen.

Leaving Home will most likely make Garrison Keillor's fans love him all the more. For you who don't like him or have not taken the time to shape an opinion, I recommend that you at least go to a bookstore and open the book to a story at random and read it while standing up. They're short enough to do that without getting tired. For some of you, they will make you remember the home you never had.