Summary
First published: New York: Viking, 1985
Genre(s): Novel
Subgenre(s): Humor
Core issue(s): Church; daily living; faith; freedom and free will; Lutherans and Lutheranism; Protestants and Protestantism
Principal characters
Prudence Alcott, an early explorer
Henry Francis Watt, the founder of New Albion College
Magnus Oleson, a prodigious Norwegian pioneer
Gunder Muus, the town’s first Norwegian bachelor farmer
David Ingqvist, the pastor of Lake Wobegon Lutheran
Father Emil, the priest of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility
Herman Hochstetter, the founder of Lake Wobegon’s “Living Flag” tradition
Clarence Bunsen, the owner of Bunsen Motors
Clint Bunsen, the town mayor
Wally “Hard Hands” Bunsen, the town hero, who once played for the Chicago Cubs
Mr. Berge, the town drunk
Miss Falconer, a Wobegon schoolteacher
Johnny Tollefson, an adolescent who yearns to escape Lake Wobegon
Harold Starr, the editor of the Lake Wobegon Herald-Star
Overview
In Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor provides a humorous glance at the religious influences that shape small-town life in Minnesota. In doing so, he makes extensive use of mock autobiography to project a series of idiosyncratic accounts of events by various Wobegonians as they clumsily seek to supplant their humdrum lives with something more dramatic and fulfilling. Keillor’s protagonist—a fictional version of himself—mediates these stories by setting their banal details against an idealized image, often literary or spiritual in origin, and the result provides a comic paradox that consistently shows how small-town life falls short of idealized versions posited by scripture, frontier myth, and history.
Structurally, Lake Wobegon Days more closely resembles a collection of literary pieces than a conventional novel. As such, it does not follow a traditional plot progression, but instead relies on a three-tiered, episodic narrative to unify the stories it contains. The first strand consists largely of the author’s reminiscences, which include a chapter that describes Lake Wobegon’s main street and its landmarks, including the water tower, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, the Sidetrack Tap, the Chatterbox Café, the churches, Adam’s Hill, and the lake. Another chapter chronicles the Protestant roots of Keillor’s Christian upbringing and provides observations about his early experiences as a member of the fundamentalist sect, the Sanctified Brethren, as well as reflections about his secret childhood admiration for other Wobegon denominations, especially the splendid music and vestments of the Lutherans and the regal and gorgeous pomp of the Catholics. Later, Keillor adds a chapter entitled “School,” which affords an ironic commentary about teachers and the trio of Wobegonian educational virtues: work, effort, and conduct. Finally, Keillor complements his childhood narrative with four additional chapters—“Summer,” “Fall,” “Winter,” and “Spring”—to capture comedic seasonal glimpses of the yearly cycles of his youth.
Tottering on the edge of sentimentality, but never quite toppling over it, Keillor counters his frequent nostalgic tendencies with occasional acidic wit. The “News” chapter, for example, includes an extended footnote entitled “95 Theses 95,” modeled after Martin Luther’s landmark sixteenth century rebellion against the indulgences of the Catholic Church. In this case, however, Keillor follows the example of another famous Minnesotan, Sinclair Lewis, to satirize the oppressive influences of small-town life, including parents, social conventions, education, and, of course, his religious roots. The cumulative effect of this device moderates the tone of the book and acts as a bittersweet counterpoint to some of the gentle portraits found in other parts of the story.
The second narrative thread mirrors the first and features the story of Johnny Tollefson, a fictive double of Keillor, who graduates from high school and goes off to Saint Cloud State College (Keillor attended the...
(This entire section contains 1382 words.)
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University of Minnesota), where he aspires to become a writer. Unlike Keillor, however, Johnny fails at it. The first in his Lutheran family to attend a university, Johnny is accompanied to July registration by his mother, his grandmother, and his aunt and uncle, Mary and Senator K. Thorvaldson (so named not because he held political office but because his mother thought it sounded good). Johnny is embarrassed by it all, as he considers them all hicks, and he does his best to distance himself from them at the first opportunity. In search of freedom from the stifling dullness and frugality they represent, Johnny looks for release in the idealized fiction of the Flambeau Family mystery series (every one of which he has read twice), which chronicles the exploits of Eileen and Emile Flambeau, a Nobel laureate microbiologist who lives in Manhattan and solves mysteries through the use of his superior intellect. In a final symbolic gesture of defiance after arriving at the college, Johnny temporarily escapes his family and, in a quiet corner near Meister hall, lights up a cigarette that he has saved especially for this occasion.
The third narrative layer—“New Albion,” “Forebears,” and “Sumus Quod Sumus” (“We are what we are”)—is a mock historical one that chronicles the town’s founding by misguided New England transcendentalists. The main characters, including Basile Fonteneau, Henry Francis Watt, and Prudence Alcott, do not exist in Minnesota history, but by using them as a platform, Keillor burlesques everything from the French explorers’ legacy, perpetrated in Lake Wobegon by names left upon the land (in this case Lac Malheur), to the vestiges of early New England religious and literary forms. The story of Prudence Alcott loosely echoes Puritan captivity narratives, and in Henry Francis Watt, the founder of New Albion College, Keillor spoofs literary forebears ranging from William Bradford and Ralph Waldo Emerson to William Cullen Bryant and even John Steinbeck. To leaven these fictive and religious allusions, Keillor adds historical parody. For example, Minnesota’s first school was indeed founded by a woman (Harriet Bishop, not Prudence Alcott), but it was not devoted to converting the Indians to Christianity. Likewise, the first president of the University of Minnesota was a New Englander, but his name was William Watts Folwell, not Henry Francis Watt.
Christian Themes
Most of the stories in Lake Wobegon Days reverberate with the Christian virtues of hard work, frugality, modesty, and self-restraint, which are also the pillars of the mythic midwestern agrarian value system. For the people who reside there, the guide to and justification for virtuous living is clearly Christianity, and the two religious groups Keillor discusses most frequently are the Lutherans, who are mainly of Norwegian immigrant stock, and the Catholics, who are mostly of German descent. The Lutherans attend Lake Wobegon Lutheran, where David Ingqvist is the pastor, and the Catholics attend Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where Father Emil is priest. The tension between these two denominations is the source for much of the humor in the novel.
In addition to mentioning Lutherans and Catholics, Keillor discusses other religions as well, particularly the Sanctified Brethren, a fundamentalist sect akin to the Plymouth Brethren, his actual childhood denomination. Although Keillor admires the intimacy and quiet peace found in the forms of worship of his childhood faith, he takes special note of some of its most glaring limitations, particularly its exclusion of women from the power structures of the Church, its rigid code of dress and behavior, and its propensity to split and fragment into smaller groups.
For the most part, however, Keillor generally treats the Christian belief systems found in Lake Wobegon with gentle irony, even though his preferred organized religion would seem to be Lutheranism. In the Protestant tenets of the Lutheran faith, Keillor finds as much fallibility as in those of any other denomination; yet, within the context of the novel, it offers the faithful citizens of Lake Wobegon something of a reasonable compromise between the isolating fundamentalism of the Sanctified Brethren and the unbending dogma of the Catholic faith.
Sources for Further Study
- Des Moines Register. September 26, 1985, p. 1T.
- Fry, Katherine G. “A Cultural Geography of Lake Wobegon.” Howard Journal of Communications 9 (October, 1998): 303-321. Analyzes the pastoral ideal and value system found in Keillor’s work.
- Lee, Judith Yaross. Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991. A thorough exploration of Keillor’s comic imagination. Bibliographical entries, index.
- The New York Times Book Review. XC, August 25, 1985, p. 1.
- Newsweek. CV, September 9, 1985, p. 92.
- Publishers Weekly. CCXXVII, September 13, 1985, p. 138.
- Scholl, Peter A. Garrison Keillor. New York: Twayne, 1993. A useful critical introduction to Keillor’s early works. Biographical information, bibliography, and index.
- Time. CXXVI, November 4, 1985, p. 68.
