The awkward title of Garrison Keillor's latest novel looks suspiciously like a marketing device. Flagging the Lake Woebegone brand-name will be forgiven by aficionado's of the fictitious Minnesota country and Keillor's long-running radio programme, A Prairie Home Companion, but mention of 1956 seems calculated to appeal to the nostalgia market, in particular, the baby boomer generation, which has a well-documented need to read about itself.
Even "summer" now pitches itself as ideal escapism for anyone missing the world that existed before September 11th. Which indeed it is. But charming, funny, and just the right amount of sad in the end, the novel is also as good as anything Keillor has written.
Summer in Minnesota is all the sweeter for being short, and although at 291 pages this is no novella, it's pacing is one of the unexpected delights. Sceptics who ploughed through the epic Lake Woebegone Days waiting for a punchline may be surprised to find themselves breezing through this one and laughing out loud along the way.
Winter is the natural condition of Keillor's Minnesota, where Lutheran Norwegian's- God's Frozen people- found a climate to match their world view. The brief thaw recorded here is all the more dramatic in that the story is set among the Sanctified Brethren, a sect which frowns on the mainstream Lutherans for tolerating "false doctrines and loose behaviour" and generally going the same way as Catholics. So when a teenage daughter of the brethren becomes pregnant by the local baseball hero, darkness falls over the world.
Religion aside, the novel treads well-worn ground. The central character- who, stretching the definitions of fiction, is a big ungainly youth called Gary with an ambition to write for the New Yorker- comes of age against the background of rock n roll and the Cold War. But the peculiarity of Lake Woebegone wraps itself around the old story.
It's an incestuous story - in the figurative sense, mostly - in that all the hero's important relationships take place within the family. He loathes his scripture-quoting sister, loves his moderate-Christian mother and, in one of the more tender themes of the book, finds himself repulsed by a once-doted-upon and still doting aunt who he now realised for the first time is not quite all there. Even when he escapes the family's web, it is through infatuation with his older cousin Kate. Older, wilder and daring to go bra-less in a society where restraint is highly prized, Kate is someone with whom Gary would be only too happy to turn the brethren's incestuousness from metaphor to reality, albeit in a fantasy where she reveals she is in fact adopted and half- Indian. Kate is already on the way to becoming the baseball star's teenage bride, her pregnancy a cause of secret joy to Gary's sister. At the crisis family meeting, the latter is a 16 year old tower of strength, to her brother's disgust." I don't believe God sends us any tribulation except to strengthen us in our faith," she said devoutly, chomping on a weiner."
For Gary, the crisis inspires a writer's epiphany, and the New Yorker presumably awaits. But not before a scene where, in an irony which will be especially appreciated by Irish readers, he and Kate consummate their rebellion against society by entering a Catholic church. For the brethren, an act equivalent to "shoving your mother down the stairs or eating ground glass".
Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist.
