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About Wobegon Boy
Product Description John Tollefson, a fortysomething Norwegian bachelor public-radio manager, falls for Columbia University historian Alida Freeman, while struggling to cope with his curmugeonly father, a controlling boss, a gloomy neurotic staff, bankruptcy, and other trials and tribulations. 225,000 first printing. Amazon.com Review A decade after he first explored the small-town precincts of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor makes a comical return to his roots. Not that Wobegon Boy takes place entirely within Mist County. The narrator, John Tollefson, made an early exit from his hometown and has spent the last 20 years managing a college radio station in upstate New York. Here he seems to have put a healthy distance between himself and his Wobegonian past. For the author, John's job is a handy pulpit, allowing him to fulminate against radio, New Age affectation, and campus politicking. Keillor remains a master of the cantankerous one-liner, yet there's a romance here, too--between John and a historian named Alida Freeman. And while Keillor can't resist roping Alida into his own pan-Scandinavian schtick--she's writing a scholarly study of a 19th-century Norwegian neuropath who administered high colonics to Lincoln himself--the love story is genuinely touching and gives the novel an extra emotional ballast. So, too, does the magnetic pull of Lake Wobegon. John keeps describing life back in Minnesota as one long exercise in sensory (and emotional) deprivation: "We were not brought up to experience pleasure, so it doesn't register with us, like writing on glass with a pencil. Dullness is our stock-in-trade, dullness honed to its keenest edge." Nonetheless, he returns twice in the course of the novel, and his sojourns among the Lutherans are the source of not only comedy but home truths. From Library Journal Welcomely, this is more of Keillor's patented brand of satirical nostalgia. He picks up the adventures of Lake Wobegon's John Tollefson, now puddled in upper New York State as an NPR station manager and soon to embark on a torrid romance and a midlife crisis with time out for uproariously inconsequential visits home. It's been ten years since the previous Lake Wobegon novel (Leaving Home, LJ 10/1/87), and Keillor?who may, if he keeps this up, soon have to live branded as the worthy successor to Mark Twain and Will Rogers?is once again very consistently very clever, very funny, and, to readers of Mr. Tollefson's age, very wise, right down to the throwaway stuff ("The polka...a Norwegian martial art"). Highly recommended for general fiction collections.?David Bartholomew, NYPL Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews No, that's not thunder you're hearing. More likely it's laughter from the Hereafter, for if there's any justice here or there, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and James Thurber have already received their advance copies of this latest installment in the ongoing saga of Minnesota's endearingly phlegmatic Norwegian- Americans. Woebegon Boy isn't exactly a novel, but what the hell, who really wants one from the genial creator and host of public radio's Prairie Home Companion? What we're given here is a shred of a story--narrated by Keillor's protagonist John Tollefson, who escapes the stultifying ``cheerfulness'' of his homeland (and the girlfriend he doesn't want to marry) by securing a job as manager of a newly created radio station at upstate New York's nondescript St. James College. Shades of Jon Hassler close about the Horatio Algerlike John, who picks his way in and out of relationships with assorted academic phonies, potential business partners, and--most importantly--the Amazonian Alida Freeman, a lively university historian who isn't above any number of amorous tumbles with the smitten Wobegonian, but won't commit herself to ``the doldrums of marriage.'' The plot is really only an excuse for comic riffs on such irresistible targets as political correctness, talk ra
