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When Garrison Keillor visited London recently on a book tour, Martin Wroe talked with him about his latest novel, Wobegon Boy, his attitude toward his fundamentalist roots (Keillor was raised Plymouth Brethren), and his Christian faith. Keillor also gives a tantalizing preview of his current work-in-progress: a novel about Lake Wobegon's hapless baseball team, the Whippets, and the catalyst for their first winning season in 40 years.
One reviewer said a problem with Wobegon Boy is that it reads like a novel written in 100-yard dashes.
Well, yes, that's true. I hope the reader starts the next dash, forgetting that he just ran a previous one. I do think that it is impossible to write a comic novel as a single long take simply because a person can't be funny for a long time. We know this. People have tried, some of them at parties I have attended. Comedy is a series of short takes.
With a collection of stories, you can end your relationship with a character once you feel they have run out of interest. With a novel you must continue to make something or someone interesting to the reader for a long, long time. That is the great challenge, and it is an even greater challenge if you have a character, as I do in John Tollefson, who is not all that interesting.
Comedy is not about people who are alienated or estranged or filled with grief. Comedy is about ordinary people. And people who are privileged in some way. It is difficult to write comedy about people whom one pities. But those are really the sorts of characters that many readers prefer: people who have suffered terrible wounds in childhood and who have been able to overcome this through meditation or through truisms, through listening to one's inner self, or whatever one's mantra is—and who then went on to earn vast sums of money. That territory is not my bailiwick. I'm all for it and I'm all for people writing books. Literature is a great democracy, but those aren't my people, and in the end, deep down, though it's none of my business, I don't really believe in their means of redemption.
What is their means of redemption?
It is a kind of secular religion of self-help that is very popular in America because it is very easy. Whereas Christian theology is a matter of great mystery—which one can struggle with all one's life—nobody struggles over this secular religion. It is religion of self-gratification, almost always, in which the self is the highest authority. All illness and all personal difficulty come from conflict within one's self.
You've been critical of the Religious Right in the past, but in Wobegon Boy much of your fire seems to be directed at believe-nothing liberals.
What is often referred to as political correctness in America I refer to as pietism, a kind of secular pietism. John Tollefson is very wary of pietists—those unctuous figures who say the things that they feel one ought to say in matters of faith and belief. John is intolerant of such talk, mainly because it is boring. He is tired of going to parties at which people stand around and lament in predictable ways all the expected things. One of his complaints is that it gets harder and harder to put on a good party at which people put aside their pieties and hurl themselves over the cliff and onto the rocks of regret or whatever—but at which they have a good time.
What is God like?
We don't know that. God is beyond our knowing. He is not beyond our pursuit and our devotion, but he cannot be encompassed. That is my catechism answer to your catechism question.
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