Pontoon by Garrison Keillor: A Review

I read my signed copy of Pontoon in one evening last week. And as I have when I've read other books by GK I laughed out loud at several points. But this book is less the light folksy jaunt around the characters of Lake Wobegon that his other books are. This one's a bit darker, full of images and phrases and words that a person couldn't recite on, say, public radio.

Evelyn Peterson is found dead in her sleep by her daughter, Barbara, who then comes to discover via letters and phone messages that her mother was living a much richer life than Barbara had thought. The story has various twists and turns, but all of these are offered in thoughtful, artful Keillorian prose so you find yourself not gasping, but saying, "Ohhh..." or "Hmmm," as you round the next bend in the tale.

Regular listeners to A Prairie Home Companion will find pieces of other Lake Wobegon stories stiched into this one, which becomes a bit like seeing your old grade-school shirt patched into a beautiful new quilt: "I remember that shirt! I LOVED that shirt!" The Danish ministers having a barbecue on the pontoon boat, for example, or Ralph the fishing dog, or a naked man strapped into a flying contraption. They're all here. But the back stories are delved more deeply, and the humor is an outgrowth of the story, not its motor, so the novel has the feel of drawing back the curtains on the lives of these people whom we've come to know in a more casual way.

As a humble suggestion, I'd like Keillor's next novel to focus on Pastor Ingquist, who seems more and more like a person I'd like to meet. When a young man sputters to him about a recent sin, ending with, "I shouldn't even be saying this. And taking up your time . . ." Pastor Ingquist says simply, "It's fine. This is what I do. I listen to people--I do it all the time."

I found myself nodding at this point, Pastor Ingquist's word a verbatim of what I myself have said countless times to parishioners and others who just need to get something off their chests. Revealed here is Keillor's familiarity with ecclesiastical life: church folk aren't held up us saints, but neither are they spelled out in cynical sentences. They just are; doing what they do, as characters, not caricatures. This is a deeply appealing part of Keillor's corpus to me. He does not use the church as a mine for simpletons or do-gooders, but sees in the church all the incarnational realness of mortals being fully human in the presence of the fully divine.

Something any preacher can say amen to.