Wobegon Boy

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by E.V. Kontorovich

THOMAS Jefferson's ideal of democratic virtue, the yeoman farmer, is alive and well and living in Lake Wobegon. Jefferson argued that the Republic could not long survive without the common-sense morality of small landholders, whose moderation and literally down-to-earth attitude provides the necessary counterpoint to the avaricious urban merchants and speculators. Wobegon Boy, Garrison Keillor's latest tale of the imaginary Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, certainly suggests that the antidote to self-absorption, self-pity, and other manifestations of the 12-step society can be found among the unpretentious Norwegian townsmen of the place he has made famous through his vastly popular weekly program on National Public Radio, A Prairie Home Companion.

The novel itself is a welcome antidote to the current literary vogue, in which descriptions of small-town life center on wife-beaters in trailer parks, bastards with guns, and drunken uncles who grope their nieces. Keillor certainly does not idolize the lives led in such places: his current hero, John Toffelson, escaped Wobegon at his first opportunity, and visits with reluctance. But the better parts of the Wobegonian philosophy live on in him when he moves to upstate New York to start a radio station at a liberal-arts college favored by the "financially gifted parents of academically challenged students."

The creed is simple. It is, in its entirety: Cheer up. Make yourself useful. Mind your manners. And, above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself. In Wobegon, people know better than to blame amorphous, abstract forces for their hardships. "Winter is not a personal experience," Keillor writes with aphoristic succinctness. And it really does take a village, not a federal bureaucracy, to raise a child: "You didn't smart off to your elders, and if a lady you didn't know came by and told you to blow your nose, you blew it."

Toffelson is given many opportunities to live up to the Minnesotan mantra. The love of his life balks at his marriage proposals, his father dies, his hippie business partner cons him out of a small fortune. The best parts of the book chronicle his travails in the sanctimonious world of public radio, where airwaves once devoted to the dissemination of a humanizing culture are increasingly dominated by dreary documentaries on menopause and the dangers of amalgam fillings. The new dean demands that the college station, which broadcasts only classical music, devote more time to "the aims and aspirations of the minorities and disadvantaged," and isn't impressed with the view that Chopin says something about universal aspirations.

When the dean finds out that Third Worlders haven't written much in the way of symphonies, he pushes Toffelson to scrap music altogether in favor of an all-talk format. In the midst of this, a joke Toffelson tells at a dinner party at his home provokes a charge of sexual harassment by an anonymous informer. Needless to say, the college is only too happy to side with the humorless complainant.

Unwittingly drafted into the culture wars, Toffelson turns his thoughts back to Wobegon. He recalls stories about his idiosyncratic former neighbors and his huge extended family. These long digressions, often quirky and surreal, are some of the funniest bits of the book. They are the seasoning to a very simple base -- a love story set amidst adversity. Keillor has shown us these characters before, but now they serve to tease out a major polarity among Mid-westerners, a division as profound as that between fire and water: the Cheerful Lutherans versus the Gloomy Lutherans.

Both are polite and proper in their conduct. But after a hard day's work, the Cheerful Lutherans believe in having a few beers and dancing the polka. Wobegonians understand that the desire to outdo one's neighbor, striving for fame and wealth, cannot satisfy the soul. So instead, they mine the quiet joy and majesty contained in everyday life.

Even simple pleasures are sinful pleasures for the Dark Lutherans. They are pietists, and the shallow sentimentality of their devotion, the hollow concern for their neighbors' souls, is little different from the shallow sentimentality of, say, All Things Considered, with its manufactured concern for the Costa Rican rain forest. These brooding Lutherans suppress every spontaneous celebration of the spirit: no singing, no drinking, no dancing. And they certainly wouldn't smile at the joke that gets Toffelson into trouble.

So the son of Wobegon confronts the priests of Political Correctness confidently. He has seen their kind before: they are the spiritual descendants of the Gloomy Lutherans. Toffelson's lineage contains both strains, but he rejects the Dark side. He lives out the Wobegonian creed -- even at the most trying moments, he skirts around the poppy fields of self-pity. Finding happiness in romance, family, and music, he shields himself from the slings and arrows. Even his enemies are not despised: knowing the greyness of Dark Lutheran life, he understands that they are less happy than he.