Death and marriage intermingle in Garrison Keillor’s new novel, “Pontoon.”
Like the quilts the elder Lutheran ladies of Lake Wobegon stitch together, Keillor takes life’s complexities, doles them out to his characters and then pieces it all together to make Lake Wobegon a unique town brimming with interesting people, all with a story to tell.
Keillor is well known for his radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” and his many novels chronicling quintessential small-town life. “Pontoon” is the fourth book of his Lake Wobegon series. Like his other stories, he writes of small towns and the people who have dreams of leaving them.
“Pontoon” opens with an elderly lady, Evelyn, who’s just died while reading in bed. The angel of death comes for her, but she says “Not yet. I want to finish this book.” The angel has heard this excuse before and declines her request. Her daughter, Barbara, finds her. What Barbara doesn’t expect to find is a message on her answering machine from a strange man named Raoul who apparently has shared many intimacies with her mother.
Meanwhile, the townsfolk gossip and wonders when their time will come. No one ever expected Evelyn to go first. She was always so reliable. But then, they also didn’t know about her wild ways.
Evelyn has been traveling the world with her true love on the sly. She knew the flamenco-dancing Raoul from nursing school before she was married. She only married her ex-husband “in a burst of patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor.”
She felt sorry for him and half expected him to die in World War II. She was quite shocked when he came home: “He walked in the door and said, ‘I made it.’ And he had. There he was. And she was married to him.” She made the most of her accidental life, but when her husband fell in love with a 900-number operator, they parted ways. She then took life by the horns, enjoying every minute of her newfound freedom.
Barbara is a single mother and a bit of a drunk who secretly meets with Oliver, an overweight man who she says is a fat prince who makes her feel glamorous. They whimsically meet at the Romeo Motel after dark. Oliver is a man who is passionate in the dark but frigid in the day. She loves him, but he doesn’t love her back.
Another character, Debbie Detmer, the local bad-girl-turned-Hollywood-
success-story, left Lake Wobegon on a road to nowhere. She landed in Hollywood and became a millionaire by giving aromatherapy treatments to the pets of the rich and famous.
Debbie has returned to Lake Wobegon to marry a prissy man named Brent. She can’t call it a marriage, though, because her “fiancé” doesn’t actually want to get married, so she calls it a commitment ceremony. After a heated argument, the almost-wedding – complete with flying Elvis, a hot-air balloonist and a couple of large floating ducks – gets called off. The wedding celebration accidentally goes on without them.
Barbara and her son try to carry out Evelyn’s dying wish of being cremated – an act of treason to Evelyn’s Lutheran friends. As Evelyn requested, her ashes are put into a hollowed-out bowling ball Raoul gave her. Now the only problem is how to drop the ball in the lake.
Barbara’s son Kyle has the idea to drop it by parasail. He flies above the lake where a group of drunken Danish Lutheran pastors are steering a pontoon boat. A flying Elvis and a balloonist are crowding the air space, and as a result, Kyle loses control and then his pants – along with the bowling ball.
This is Keillor at his best. Debbie’s sabotaged wedding plans crashing Evelyn’s death ceremony is hilarious.
After the bowling ball has dropped and Kyle makes his way back to the party, he worries about his past sins and indiscretions with his live-in girlfriend. It all comes to a head at this one moment.
The inhabitants of Lake Wobegon are all like this: flawed and imperfect, yet so normal. Evelyn puts it perfectly when Barbara says to her, “Why can’t we sit and converse like normal people?” Evelyn replies: “We’re not normal people. Nobody is. We’re just us.”
It’s all of us, and Keillor knows that. This ephemeral truth makes Keillor’s writing so much fun to read. He says through his characters what we recognize in ourselves. His characters just have the good fortune of having a sense of humor through it all.
Renee Warner is an Atlanta freelance writer.
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FICTION
Pontoon
A Novel of Lake Wobegon
By Garrison Keillor
$25.95
