Wobegon Boy
by Garrison Keillor
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Book Summary Information
Author: Garrison KeillorEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-11-01
ISBN: 0140274782
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140274783
- Condition: USED - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Wobegon Boy
Book Review: Lutheran humor
Summary: 5 Stars
This a brilliant comic novel, featuring the adventures of John Tollefson. He has escaped Lutheran Minnesota to live in upstate New York, where he has taken the job of a local radio station manager. In between return visits to the mythical Wobegon, John romances historian Alida Freeman and embarks on a disastrous business venture with a New Age builder. And that's the plot, such as it is. There isn't a strong narrative thread running throughout this book, and I think that this is one of its strengths. Like many people's lives, John Tollefson's doesn't run to order. This might make for a very incoherent novel, but Keillor carries this off exceptionally well. The humour and wit are exceptional, and make 'Wobegon Boy' a huge pleasure to read. I was sorely disappointed that the book actually had to end, since it had easily put me into a very buoyant mood. Exceptional.
Summary of Wobegon Boy
John Tollefson, a son of Lake Wobegon, has moved East to manage a radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents in upstate New York. Having achieved this pleasant perch, John has a brilliant idea for a restaurant specializing in fresh sweet corn. And he falls in love with an historian named Alida Freeman, hard at work on a book about a nineteenth-century Norwegian naturopath, an acquaintance of Lincoln, Thoreau, Whitman, and Susan B. Anthony.
Caught up in his own ambitions, John visits home in Minnesota to sit in the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Cafe and listen to the talk he has heard all his life, and in that familiar landscape he discovers what is truly important to him. It all comes down to the Lake Wobegon code: Cheer Up, Make Yourself Useful, Mind Your Manners, and Avoid Self-Pity.
A decade after he first explored the small-town precincts of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor makes a comical return to his roots. Not that Wobegon Boy takes place entirely within Mist County. The narrator, John Tollefson, made an early exit from his hometown and has spent the last 20 years managing a college radio station in upstate New York. Here he seems to have put a healthy distance between himself and his Wobegonian past.
For the author, John's job is a handy pulpit, allowing him to fulminate against radio, New Age affectation, and campus politicking. Keillor remains a master of the cantankerous one-liner, yet there's a romance here, too--between John and a historian named Alida Freeman. And while Keillor can't resist roping Alida into his own pan-Scandinavian schtick--she's writing a scholarly study of a 19th-century Norwegian neuropath who administered high colonics to Lincoln himself--the love story is genuinely touching and gives the novel an extra emotional ballast.
So, too, does the magnetic pull of Lake Wobegon. John keeps describing life back in Minnesota as one long exercise in sensory (and emotional) deprivation: "We were not brought up to experience pleasure, so it doesn't register with us, like writing on glass with a pencil. Dullness is our stock-in-trade, dullness honed to its keenest edge." Nonetheless, he returns twice in the course of the novel, and his sojourns among the Lutherans are the source of not only comedy but home truths.
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