KEY POINTS:
The structural similarities between Liberty, Garrison Keillor's latest, and his previous novel, Pontoon, are striking because it is yet another Lake Wobegon story built around characters in the small mythical town in Minnesota, and because it culminates in the same way, in the pandemonium swirling round a major town event.
In Pontoon, the finale was an ebulliently funny confusion as the funeral of a beloved, hedonistic Lake Wobegonian, Evelyn, coincided with the visit of a group of drunken Danish Lutheran pastors; and in the case of Liberty it is an annual Fourth of July parade organised for the last time by the central character, Clint Bunsen.
The finale of Liberty is equally, calamitously funny but the story is darker and Clint's mid-life crisis remains unresolved. At 60, married to Irene, with three grownup children, he continually looks back to what he sees as a crucial mistake in his life when, leaving the Navy at age 23 in San Diego, he chose to go home to explain to his family that he was going to live a freer, more adventurous life in California.
Trouble is, he feels now that he got trapped into marriage and the family business. His daydreams of regret for a different life are stimulated by a DNA test which tells him his background is Hispanic and not brooding Norwegian and by an affair with 28-year-old Angelica, a lovely, promiscuous psychic.
The cast that comes together in the Fourth of July parade includes assorted individuals and groups of patriotic townsfolk, Angelica as the Statue of Liberty (naked under her robe), the State Governor attracted by the presence of a CNN crew covering the event live, a mad right-wing motel owner, and gun-toting Irene determined to get her husband back or maim him if he decides to flee with Angelica.
Keillor is capable of wonderful, rambling, ironic drollery like no other American writer. He captures the same distinctive tone in the weekly Minnesota Public Radio programme, A Prairie Home Companion, which he has made world-famous, and which was translated into a richly amusing movie of the same name. He is a prolific writer, turning out a weekly column for internet magazine Salon.com.
Although his stories are essentially frolics, Liberty has an undertone of sadness as Clint tries to cope with the regrets and recriminations which we must all come to terms with if we are to cope with our declining years.
Liberty
By Garrison Keillor (Faber & Faber $35)
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
