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Available Now: BOOM TOWN by Garrison Keillor!
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
Read the first chapter for free >>>
Purchase Boom Town Hardcover >>>
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Lying on my side in dim light, watching
I was at Mayo last week where, after years of providing urine specimens and taking a deep breath and holding it and various medical adventures, I feel like an old alum and the lab tests show that through no fault of my own I am in fairly good shape, walking upright and making sense fantabuli octopi magnanimous anthropods or not making sense if I choose.
It’s a friendly caring place where they hand you an iPad in the waiting room so you can answer questions Minnesotans would be embarrassed to ask anyone, such as “Are you being abused by your spouse or partner?” or “Are you unable to afford food or housing?” A simple way for people with serious trouble to raise a red flag.
One question they leave out is, “Have you taken up all of the bad habits you felt were required of a serious American author?” which applies in my case.
I first came to Mayo in 2001, thanks to my cousin Dr. Dan who was alarmed at my shortness of breath while I was doing a radio show, and he packed me off to Rochester where Dr. Rodysill listened to my heart for a few minutes and said, “Mitral valve prolapse,” and brought in a surgeon, Dr. Orszulak, and a few days later they wheeled me into the blue light of the OR and he performed open heart surgery and sewed up the valve. I remember the sense of great competence in that room, no false moves, no joking, nine people who knew exactly what to do next. A person doesn’t encounter this intense competence often in this world. It’s very reassuring to the one who is prone.
So my first stop this week was Cardiovascular where I lay on my left side, bare-chested, for an electrocardiogram, and I looked up and saw the silhouette of a flower fluttering on the screen and asked the technician what it was and she said, “Your mitral valve.” The little flap kept opening and closing, opening and closing, such a delicate piece of tissue, and from the repair of it, I have gained twenty-one years of life that my uncle Bob and uncle Jim didn’t get but died in their late fifties for lack of a surgical procedure developed here in Minnesota.
Cardiology is crucial science in Minnesota, we being German and Scandinavian, hefty consumers of animal fats who seldom turn down dessert, whereas psychiatry is looked on as a step above astrology or witchcraft — we’re puritans and feel that mental illness is caused by a moral flaw. It’s just how we are.
But to lie in dim light and watch my heart beating was a spiritual experience. Twenty-one years, during which I was married to a magnificent woman and we had a loving daughter and I wrote books and saw some of the watery parts of the world and enjoyed humorous friendships, and thanks to the procedure decided to skip alcohol (a depressant), which made me lighthearted — all of this depended on that small flower petal fluttering in my heart.
There’s no need to see into my brain, I live there, but to see the heart, live, on a screen was to see that life is a miracle. The petals of the valve, so delicate. I thought of my friends Leeds and Corinne and Barry and Roger and Annick and Sydney, all died so young, unfulfilled. I feel I should uphold them somehow, live in their behalf.
How shall one live up to this miracle? I believe in self-improvement but only for other people. I do seem to have certain competencies, however, and though I’m no Louis C.K. or Bill Maher, I have the advantage of a strict evangelical background, which is a good foundation for comedy, and I can recite the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order very rapidly, which is impressive, and there are little theaters here and there where people have been glad to see me, so why not?
A man lay dying, his wife holding his hand, and he said, “Darling, you’ve stuck with me through two heart attacks, a stroke, prostate cancer, the hailstorm that wiped out the beans, the tornado that blew the roof off, and now this brain cancer, and you know something? I’m starting to think you’re bad luck.”
I, on the other hand, lay on my left side in dim light and watched my heart beat, and there’s the difference.
Forget about nut cases, let's talk about what's real
The world is treacherous, my darlings, and if some ambitious person were to interview everyone who ever knew you for ten minutes or more and offered them anonymity, he could paint a bleak picture of you that you wouldn’t recognize. There’s a lot of gossip and envy and animosity out there, don’t kid yourself, so all the more reason to hold fast to your friends. These people are crucial. In high school I wanted to hang out with cool people, but coolness evaporates in your twenties or whenever you beget children, and eventually you come to know who your friends are, they’re people who share a secret language with you.
I have lunch with two old guys I knew when I was a kid and we talk for two hours and Ukraine is never mentioned or former presidents, just recollections and insistent arguments about trivia that would be meaningful to only about four other people on earth, but it’s enormously enjoyable to us.
My boyhood friend Bob and his wife, Marie, and I had dinner last week and thanks to friendly hectoring and teasing, we laughed the whole time except when we had food in our mouths. There is no point in lying unconscious on the floor while a waiter does CPR, it would be unfair to others who are enjoying their meals. And think of the headline: 79-YEAR-OLD MAN CHOKES ON POTATO WHILE GUFFAWING. And the minister conducting the funeral, hearing people whisper, “It was the joke about the penguins on the ice floe.”
Twenty years ago I stood out on Madison Avenue at 2:30 a.m. with George Plimpton, hailing a cab, and he said, “Friendship is what it’s all about. It what it’s always been about.” He’d been drinking Scotch, I was sober, and we were only distant acquaintances, I was a fan of his books, but it had been a wonderful party and it was a fall night and the city felt golden.
George went to Harvard, his dad was an attorney and diplomat, his ancestors came over on the Mayflower; I went to the University of Minnesota, my dad was a railway mail clerk, my people came out of the slums of Glasgow and the woods of Canada. So there was a gap between the two of us. But at that moment, 2:30 a.m., we felt a beautiful bond.
George had a gift for friendship. So did his friend the poet Donald Hall, whom I met later. Writers you admire seem so formidable upon first meeting but Maxine Kumin sat and talked about her farm and her horses and W.S. Merwin showed me his palm tree forest on Maui and Jim Harrison talked about his cabin in the Upper Peninsula and the first time I met David Sedaris it was like we’d known each other for years.
It’s a gift of bestowal, and I don’t have it, being the spawn of evangelical separatists but now and then I overcome this upbringing and bestow generosity of spirit. I call up friends and I don’t say, “Hello, how are you?” I launch right in and we gab for twenty minutes in our own private language. These people are irreplaceable as I well know, thinking about Arvonne, Corinne, Sydney, Bill, Irv, all departed.
Irv Letofsky was my hero when I was 20 and I dropped out of college to write for the St. Paul paper where he was a star reporter. I wrote obituaries; he wrote politics. We had lunch sometimes. He also wrote for a satire revue, The Brave New Workshop, and I showed him some of my fiction and he thought it was good. Then I went back to school and he disappeared out west. I ran into him twenty years later at the Los Angeles Times when I was on tour for a book of mine and the editors threw a luncheon for me and there was Irv, with the same dazzling smile, an editor himself, and he leaned over and said, “I knew you when you were just white trash. That’s great that the publisher invited you to lunch but don’t crap in your pants.” It was a Fargo guy’s way of making me feel at home.
Once friends, forever friends: it’s a fact. True friendship goes on and on, it doesn’t fade, and one day, years later, you make contact again and we’re talking about the softball game where Uncle Don hit the line drive down the third baseline and I backhanded it on one bounce and threw him out at first. Jim remembers it and so do I. I’m an old has-been now but I could’ve been a contender. He knows it and so do I, and two is enough.