Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon

It's been about four years since the last Wobegone book, LAKE WOBEGONE SUMMER 1956. That one featured Gary, Keillor's alter ego. I didn't really like it until I heard excerpts from it in one of Keillor's Prairie Home Companion PBS specials. Suddenly, it got a whole lot better. The man has the best "radio" voice since Jean Shepherd.I liked PONTOON a little bit better because these characters seem a whole lot more real. Evelyn Peterson is an 82-year-old Lutheran lady who dies at the beginning of the book. She had no time for funerals. She wants to be cremated, her ashes put in a bowling ball and thrown in a lake. She leaves a letter for daughter Barbara outlining her wishes. Barbara also discovers letters from Raoul, a lover she never knew her mother had. If you live in Minnesota you'll recognize Raoul. He's a moderator of a children's show that featured THE LITTLE RASCALS who sounds a whole lot like Clelland Card, creator of "Axel and his Dog."The other featured character is Debbie Detmer, who had left Wobegone to make her fortune in Hollywood. She did, all right, but in a rather strange profession, aroma therapist to pets. This is just Keillor cracking wise. An aroma therapist to dogs is no stranger than tourists who visit the bathroom where Senator Craig was arrested.Occasionally Keillor will throw in a poem or a song lyric that I would guess come from his show. "Oh the horses stood around with their feet upon the ground and who will wind my wristwatch when I'm gone? We feed the baby garlic so we can find him in the dark, and a girl's best friend is her mother" is a sample. He can also get down-right philosophical: "The trick is to not want it that much. Want it less. When you get to where you don't want it all, then you might get it." Nobody does pathos mixed with humor as well as Keillor.Keillor also seems to be suggesting that living in Wobegone might not be the best sort of life decision to make. Evelyn only started to live when she hit her seventies, traveling all sorts of places with Raoul. Her cremation and burial in a bowling ball is a message to her daughter to live life to the fullest, not to settle for a staid existence.

If you're a Keillor fan like me, I guess it's overstatement to say that he is a master storyteller, and this book is mostly a gem. Although some characters are treated more kindly than others, even the sometime antagonists—Aunt Flo, Pastor Ingvist—are eventually treated even-handedly and have moments of redemption. If you like Keillor, you'll love this book.Possible spoilers ahead: I wasn't crazy about the denouement. It was too over-the-top slapstick-y and didn't quite suit all the ground that was laid before it. Requires quite a suspension of disbelief that Debbie would cancel her wedding and leave town without notifying all the various people she'd hired to participate. Also hard to buy that the speedboat drive, regardless of how dim, would never look at who he's towing.The character of Kyle was written inconsistenyly, in that he took a 180 from being a smart, savvy college guy to kind of a dummy (that discussion with the pastor near the end, oof!). The same gag—a man becoming tumescent at an inappropriate time—was used twice in the book; it was marginally amusing the first time; the second, ridiculous, actually. Last, the book could have used a good copyedit. I'm not a fan of overpunctuation, but either Keillor or his editor are comma-averse, and the lack inhibits the read at moments.I liked everything that led up to the climatic scene at the lake a lot. The Evelyn and Barbara stories get more pages than Debbie Detmer, but they are all wonderful. It loses a star because of the ending and the other points made above.

The paragraphs are soooo long. It's distracting when writers do that.

This was a great book until the very end. I was reading along and enjoying the characters and the escapades of the Lake Wobegon crowd as they tried to celebrate the life of Evelyn. The ceremony at the lakeshore had me laughing out loud with the craziness. However, suddenly, I felt as though I ran face-first into a wall. Everything stopped as Barbara got in her car and left Lake Wobegon for... Columbus, Georgia? Thinking she can find a better life there rather than in her hometown. End of story. I literally sat staring at my Kindle in a confused state at the amazement of how this book went from great to... dull in a matter of about seven pages.Still, I liked the book and would recommend it for fans of Keillor.

I saw a copy of the original Lake Wobegon Days at a used book store and had wonderful memories of having read it many summers ago at a cottage in New Hampshire. So, I decided to try Pontoon on my kindle while traveling in Panama. I remember the characters in LWD being quirky and warm, but every character in Pontoon was just sad and seriously flawed. The folks in the Lutheran church, including the minister, were all portrayed as sort of silly people, deluded by their ridiculous faith. To be truthful, the minister in the book WAS ridiculous in the way he spoke and acted on many occasions. I guess it was just his day job, cause NOTHING he did jibed with the bible!! The main character (recently deceased mother)only gains her freedom when she throws aside her faith in God and embarks on a self-centered, secret life leaving her children bewildered and heartbroken without the opportunity to resolve any of the many problems she's left them with since she is now gone.Don't know what's happened in Garrison's life, but MAN, he certainly has a low opinion of people. Won't be back for another read from him. Sad, sad,sad.

Modern day Mark Twain - everyone should read at least book by Garrison

A return to Lake wobegon and it's wonderful cast of characters . This book is the equivalent of wrapping oneself in a warm blanket with a good scotch and sitting on the settee for a few hours escape and this is just what I did without the blanket. Evelyn Patterson wants her ashes put in a bowling ball and dropped into Lake wobegon. Great story , great characters full of human frailty and idiosyncracies , it is all you expect of Garrison Keillor . I was not disappointed. I have to say i agree with other reviewer who said it was written with speech in mind as i can hear Garrison tell this story in my mind.

I hadn't read a Keillor novel since about 1990 after first hearing him on Radio 4 and now wonder why I have waited so long before picking up another of his books. He is an absolute pleasure to read. He effortlessly describes everything with such clarity and dry humour. His observations of life in this fictitious town can be quite acerbic but always with a degree of affection.He is a very skilled and entertaining writer and I look forward to reading all of his remaining Lake Wobegon novels.

I only discovered Garrison Keillor a few months ago and have eagerly devoured his work since then - books, film and podcasts of his radio show Lake Wobegon Days. I have enjoyed everything and this book is up there with the best of his work, in my opinion. I love his style and humour, in fact I almost fell out of bed laughing as I read the last couple of chapters! Wonderful stuff!

Loved it and it is set in wonderful Wobegone where all and anything can happen. Garrison Keillor writes well and tells a good story. The book is a mixture of good and sad but with a big doze of amusement wowen into it. Wonderful, realaxing read. A real feel gooder.

Perhaps I'm being a little unfair to this book, having just read Keillor's "Radio Romance"--a far better book--and Zamoyski's "1812", which is my candidate for book of the year. As much as I wanted to like Pontoon, it is set in the present day, and the old formula just doesn't work. The magic of the old days were that small Midwestern towns were almost self-contained universes, connected to the outside world only by radio and badly-paved roads (and a train, if they were lucky). Now that my last friends and relatives from Saginaw are either dead or moved, I find the place unutterably depressing--little more than a bleak dormitory with attached slums.Keillor does his best to rescue the present-day Lake Wobegon from a similar fate, but it doesn't work. Everyone's hopes and dreams are elsewhere. You can't have fun with dysfunctional marriages when people just split up and run away to California, or wherever. Unbelievably, Keillor even recycles an old gag, where a gaggle of Lutheran ministers go out on the eponymous pontoon boat, which of course is overloaded and capsizes. It was sort of funny the first time.Keillor keeps you turning the pages, but I couldn't warm to any of the characters. I'm not sure that Keillor did, either. I can't get excited about old women who decide that their lives were wasted on boorish husbands, and then procede to get divorced and move to some other town in the hopes that a change of scenery will revitalise their lives. The vital ingredient of the Lake Wobegon books is that however much he lampooned his characters, he still was very fond of them. That generosity of spirit struggles quite a bit in Pontoon.