what a shame
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I love everything that GK has written - but not this. It felt rushed; the new characters felt stale and the slapstick was tedious - even slightly adolescent. I also noticed the rehashed pastors in a pontoon story. There was a strange whiff of cynicism about it. Contrast this with the wonderful 'Love me', 'Leaving Home' or pretty much anything else Keillor has written.
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Funny, understated and gentle
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If you're already a devotee of Garrison Keillor's books on life in the town of Lake Wobegon, chances are you'll love this latest tale. If not, why not take the plunge ? This is a gentle, but deceptively sharp, story of the death of Evelyn Peterson and what happens as her family first reflects on the life of a woman whose passing discloses a hidden existence they barely knew she had, and then carries out her final wish: to have her ashes sealed into a bowling ball and dropped into the lake from a parasail. Along the way, the world of stolid Minnesota Lutherans collides with that of a local woman made good, now back in town and intent on a typically West Coast (and very unWobegonian) wedding on the lake. Throw in a group of Danish pastors sent to the US as punishment for upsetting Danish church-state relations, and you have a dénoument as gently funny as it is understated.
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Things ain't what they used to be
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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.
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The brilliance of the ordinary
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The wonder and excitement of ordinary, everyday life: Lake Wobegone is an unexceptional place with plain, run-of-the-mill residents where nothing of interest is supposed to happen. Yet it does. Small-town America, full of people who should have little experience of life outside their own county, let alone country, but whose small dramas and life stories make for riveting reading. Garrison Keillor's book is just like the town he writes about: the dull is interesting, the uneventful eventful and those things supposed to be wonderful and exceptional are pointless, boring and facile. This book should not be interesting, but it is, there is no grand revelation here just good, entertaining writing that had me up to the middle of the night wanting to know what happened next. Read it.
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