Pontoon (Keillor)

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Woebegon
Garrison Keillor, 2007
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143114109

Summary
In this novel, Keillor's first Wobegon fiction since Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 was published in 2001, we meet Evelyn, a good church-going Lutheran, a devoted mother, a serious quilter. Only after she dies in her sleep as she always wished she would, do we find out that she has been living a secret life. She's been in love with Raoul, a Las Vegas man who took her dancing and showed her the joys of life outside Lake Wobegon.

Then, there's her daughter, Barbara, who struggles with her drinking and, inspired by her mother's unconventional life, decides to dry out and thumb her nose at the Wobegon establishment by carrying out Evelyn's final wish: to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over Lake Wobegon from a pontoon boat.

We also meet Debbie Detmer, a veterinary aromatherapy millionaire, who has returned home to Wobegon from California with her troubled, uncommitted fiancé in the hope that a lavish wedding with Moet and shrimp shishkebab will save them. But the plans for a Pontoon boat wedding, with the hot air balloon hauling a singing Elvis in for the finale, go terribly wrong. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—August 7, 1942
• Where—Anoka, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B. A., University of Minnesota
• Awards—Radio Hall of Fame; Grammy Award for Best
   Spoken-Word Album; National Humanities Medal
• Currently—lives in St. Paul, Minnesota

Garrison Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on United Kingdom's BBC 7, as well as on RTE in Ireland and Australia's ABC).

Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of Grace Ruth (nee Denham) and John Philip Keillor, who was a carpenter and postal worker. He was raised in a family belonging to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination he has since left. He is six feet, three inches (1.9 m) tall and has Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is currently an Episcopalian, but has been a Lutheran. His religious roots are frequently worked into his material: he often remarks that most Minnesotans, being of Scandinavian descent, are Lutherans. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.

Garrison Keillor started his radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), and distributing programs under the American Public Media (APM) brand. He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time-slot of eclectic music (a major divergence from the station's classical music format), 6 am to 9 am, on KSJR 90.1 FM at St. John's University in Collegeville, which the station called A Prairie Home Entertainment. During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared September 19, 1970.

Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October. Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them, and in August 1973 the Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.

A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Auto Repair ("All tracks lead to Jack's where the bright shining lights lead the way to complete satisfaction") and Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." Later imaginary sponsors have included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along Pretty Good without it"), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Catchup Advisory Board (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the American Duct Tape Council, and Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations"). The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home submitted by members of the theater audience, in exchange for an honorarium.

Also in the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcase a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled News from Lake Wobegon. The town is based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and in part on small towns near Holdingford, Minnesota where he lived in the early 1970s. Lake Wobegon is a quintessential but fictional Midwestern small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." A Prairie Home Companion ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, The American Radio Company of the Air— which was virtually identical in format to A Prairie Home Companion—for several years.

In 1993 he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, with nearly identically formatted programs, and has done so since. On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor receives no billing or credit (except "written by Sarah Bellum," a joking reference to his own brain); his name is not mentioned unless a guest addresses him by his first name or the initials "G. K." However, some sketches do feature Keillor as his alter ego, Carson Wyler, which is a play on his name. At some point Keillor took A Prairie Home Companion on the road; today, the show is broadcast live or taped for broadcast at popular venues around the United States, often featuring local celebrities and skits slanted at local color.

Keillor is also the host of The Writer's Almanac which, like A Prairie Home Companion, is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Writer's Almanac is also available online and via daily e-mail installments by subscription. Keillor has written many magazine and newspaper articles, and nearly a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to his time as a writer for The New Yorker, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com.

He also authored an advice column at Salon.com under the name "Mr. Blue." Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001. In 2004 Keillor published a collection of political essays called Homegrown Democrat, and in June 2005 he began a syndicated newspaper column called "The Old Scout," which often addresses political issues. That column also runs at Salon.com. Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)

Keillor splits his time between his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an apartment in New York City. He has been married three times. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
At bottom this is a tough-minded book, as aware of life's betrayals and griefs as it is of the grace notes and buffooneries that leaven everyday existence.... With all their familiar elements, Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" books have become a set of synoptic gospels, full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope. This one even contains an epilogue, the closest thing to an afterlife that fiction can offer.
Thomas Mallon - New York Times

Pontoon, Garrison Keillor's first "Lake Wobegon" novel in six years, abounds with good-humored satire, lyrical evocations of Keillor's beloved Midwestern community and characters as believable as your next-door neighbors.... In these parlous latter days, contemporary fiction isn't, heaven forbid, supposed to be entertaining and funny. I hope I'm not tolling the death knell for Pontoon by admitting that I don't recall laughing out loud over a novel so frequently since the last time I read A Confederacy of Dunces. For my money, that's a tribute to Keillor's highly skilled storytelling.
Howard Frank Mosher - Washington Post

Only comedian of horrors Christopher Moore, in his tales of Pine Cove, California, rivals Keillor as a provincial farceur. —Ray Olson
Booklist

Keillor's delightful latest addition to the "Lake Wobegon" series, set in the fictional Minnesota town known to legions of A Prairie Home Companion radio show fans, opens with a typically laconic musing: Evelyn was an insomniac, so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that. The author's storytelling skills come to the fore as he describes Evelyn Peterson, a sprightly 82-year-old whose secret life of romance and adventure is revealed after her death. Her daughter, Barbara, a please-everyone type with a fondness for chocolate liqueur, finds Evelyn dead in bed, and things snowball from there. Debbie Detmer, who made her fortune as an animal therapist for the rich and famous, is planning a grand commitment ceremony (on a pontoon boat in Lake Wobegon) to celebrate her relationship with a private jet time-share salesman. Meanwhile, Barbara plans to carry out her mother's wishes for a cremation ceremony involving a bowling ball filled with her ashes, and then there's the group of Danish Lutheran ministers stopping by Lake Wobegon on their tour of the U.S. Keillor's longtime fans may find some of the material familiar (he notes he's told this story several hundred times...with many variations), but there's plenty of fun to be had with the well-timed deadpans and homespun wit.
Publishers Weekly

The life and loves of a spirited woman cast a beguiling shadow over the good citizens of Lake Wobegon in Keillor's warmhearted latest comic romp. It opens with a killer sentence ("Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that") and follows it with a gem-like introductory paragraph summarizing Evelyn Peterson's vigorous life and introduction to the afterlife. We then learn that Evelyn—a leggy, energetic beauty with a mind of her own—kicked up her heels after divorcing her morose husband of 40 years, traveled and raised hell and took up with old boyfriend Raoul (aka TV's "Yonny Yonson of the Yungle"), thus setting a free-spirited example that scandalized her Lutheran neighbors and challenged her 50-something daughter Barbara. The latter, herself divorced, the mother of an adult retarded daughter and a son in college desperate to know how to live his life, is bedeviled by a drinking problem and a decision over whether to honor Evelyn's directions for a rather unconventional burial service. These problems are compounded by the return of local "bad girl" Debbie Detmer, who has made a fortune as a California aromatherapist and is back for a "commitment ceremony" yoking her to her noncommittal boyfriend. None of this quite amounts to a plot, as Keillor (Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America, 2004, etc.) frequently strays away from linear narrative to write about who or whatever happens to interest him. Still, events proceed with amiable illogic, peaking in a farcical scene featuring Evelyn's grandson Kyle on water skis, 24 apostate Danish pastors who happen to be visiting, a "fish-catching" dog named Bruno and residual disturbances related to Debbie's ill-fated commitment ceremony. The family and community ties are strong, the people are good looking and the belly-laugh quotient is above average. Tune in. You won't be disappointed.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Pontoon:

1. What do you think of Evelyn and her secret life? Did she live a truncated life with Lloyd, a life full of regrets with only brief respites spent with a man she truly loved? Or do you believe she lived her life to the fullest? Do you find her secrecy admirable...or duplicious...or what?

2. What does Evelyn mean in her letter to Barbara about the need to "get away from the killers"? Who are the killers and what is Evelyn's objection to some of her neighbors?

3. How would you describe Barbara...and what was her relationship with her mother? If you were Barbara, discovering your mother's secret life after her death, how would you feel? How does Barbara react...at first.

4. Talk about the quality of Barbara's life? How does the knowledge of her mother's secret affair gradually change Barbara—and her understanding of her own life? Why does she decide to go along with Evelyn's wish to be cremated?

5. What do you think of Debbie's plan for her commitment ceremony with her boyfriend? Good idea..bad idea? Good guy...not so good?

6. What parts of the book did you find particularly funny? Read them out loud.

7. Keillor, despite his gentle and often rollicking humor, never lets us forget that sadness and hardship are just around the corner—it 's just the way life is, for all of us. How does Keillor portray life's disappointments in Pontoon? And how does he portray life's simple pleasures—those small things that bring us moments of joy? Point out some of those passages.

8. What was your reaction to the ending—did you see it coming, and was it worth the wait? Was Keillor able, in your judgment, to pull of a hilarious farce at the end, or were you let down?

9. How would you describe the community and communal ties of Lake Wobegon? Would you like to live in Lake Wobegon ... or somewhere like it? Or do you already live in a similar town? What would be pleasurable about living in such a place? And what would be difficult?

10. Do you listen to Keillor's Lake Wobegon radio show? If so, how does this book compare to his monlogue in the second half of the show? If you've never listened to the show, does Pontoon inspire you to do so?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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