Garrison Keillor: Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

By GILBERT WONG*

Essential American humorist Keillor settles on his own summer of love, when as a boy he came up against his hormones and adolescent angst. This thinly disguised autobiography focuses on "Gary", a boy who thinks he looks like a tree toad, growing up in Lake Wobegon, the author's mythical protestant Midwest American town of homespun values and equally homespun people.

His small clan of God-fearing Sacred Brethren are left as startled as chickens when rock'n'roll and teen lust arrive over a long, hot summer.

The young Gary faces every teen's rites of passage. He burns for his coltish cousin Kate who lets him touch her breasts. He begins his first writing job, taking along his Underwood to cover baseball for the local paper and spends far too much time poring over his illicit copy of pictorial publication High School Orgies.

Keillor writes with a poetic wistfulness and sheer deftness that comes without any hint of the saccharine. He captures a time lovingly rendered by Norman Rockwell, but unlike the painter, never gives in to easy homilies or golden-hued sentiment.

Gary has to deal with mental illness in the family, the tyrants at his school, classmates and teachers, but most of all has to find a way to become the writer he would grow up to be.

His journey is as engrossing as it is gentle and true.

Faber and Faber

$26.95

* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland journalist.