WLT

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“Keillor recreates the warmth, charm and hilarity of the best of his Lake Wobegon monologues. . . . It makes for bittersweet, lovely storytelling. . . . WLT is laugh-out-loud funny: somehow Keillor manages to hold the thin balance between innocent charm and burlesque.”

—
Detroit Free Press

 

“This is ranting excess of the finest quality, and a case could be made that its author is the most gifted and prodigious humorist the U.S. has heard from since the old steamboat pilot ran aground.”

—
Time

 

“Meshing wicked satire and loving nostalgia he has transmuted them into something folkloric—pure, Keillor-style Americana.”

 

“WLT
is far and away Mr. Keillor's saltiest book. . . . It is funny—wildly, hysterically, boisterously funny—but acute in its observation of human frailties and cruelties. Above all, it is wonderfully accepting and forgiving.”

—
Atlanta Journal & Constitution

 

“Keillor's irresistibly delicious novel,
WLT: A Radio Romance . . .
is vivid and hilarious and sometimes, when it slyly alludes to the false values the media has sold us, it is downright subversive. . . . A satisfying romp with a shrewd yarnmaster who can make you howl. The Midwest sensibility, compassionate and knowing, yet unsentimental, is also worth the price of admission.”

—
The Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

“This is one of the funniest books to hit the shelves in a long, long time. . . . The humor builds to such crescendos that most readers will laugh out loud—frequently and at times uncontrollably.”

—
The Denver Post

 

“Garrison Keillor's new novel tunes in to his most sizzlingly funny material yet. The jokes that zip out almost non-stop are generally blacker and bluer than those in the Lake Wobegon tales. But although the patter is raunchier, the pattern stays the same. Through expertly delivered anecdotes, loaded with bizarre odds and ends, Keillor accumulates a detailed reconstruction of a small community and its swarming population of idiosyncratic folk . . . a mordantly hilarious little masterpiece.”

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

 

“Garrison Keillor, he of the gently lunatic yarn, the languid delivery and the marshmallow heart, has learned to talk dirty. This is the Minnesota bard's first novel, and he uses the extra length to discuss parts a good Lutheran prefers to keep private. Breasts, in particular, nudge, wink and tumble incessantly through the narrative: more naughty postcard than
Story of 0
maybe, but still enough to make a clean-living Wobegonerblush.”

—
Independent on Sunday
(London)

 

“He is the great poet of American mediocrity of hollow lives bloated with determined piety, and this wry tale of failure masquerading as success is a fitting showcase for his sardonic talents.

—
Sunday Telegraph
(London)

 

“This satire includes everything Mr. Keillor ever yearned to broadcast on his own Lake Wobegon show—and discreetly omitted. The result is very amusing indeed.”

—
The Atlantic

 

“Keillor's novel evokes the romance as well as the silliness of early radio. It charms and touches you while you are laughing out loud.”

—Digby Diehl,
Playboy

 

“
WLT
is a romance in the Hawthornean sense: It's fantastical and extravagant . . . a complex book, with thickets of funny details. There is some of Keillor's best stuff in it, which is saying quite a bit.”

—
The Kansas City Star

 

 

“[It] had me spraying Diet Coke from my nostrils and scattering popcorn across the carpet in great gusts of mirth. . . . As sharp and funny a comic novel as any I've read in the '90s.”

—Henry Kisor,
Chicago Sun-Times

“A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life.”

—
Chicago Tribune

ISBN
0-14-013160-4

“These monologues hold up as a string of lovely vignettes and memorable portraits... and slowly climb to peaks of quiet hilarity.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

 

THE BOOK OF GUYS

 

“Marvelous stuff from the funniest American writer still open for business.”

—
Time

 

“Cerebral and complex, a blend of romance and nostalgia; it sparklingly parodies the American (and human) condition. . . . His stories and satires glow with a sense of time and place.”

—
The Washington Post

 

“The shock, for a radio fan leafing through this collection, is to discover, perhaps not for the first or fifth time, that his hero is even more gifted as writer than as entertainer.”

—
Time

 

“A praise-song to old-time radio. . . . It's the wicked brother of A Prairie
Home Companion
. A real lollapalooza.”

—Studs Terkel,
Chicago Sun-Times

PENGUIN BOOKS

Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942, and attended Anoka High School and the University of Minnesota. He has worked in radio since 1963, and is the host and writer of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Keillor is the author of nine books, including
Happy to Be Here, Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home, We Are Still Married, The Book of Guys,
and
Wobegon Boy
. He lives in St. Paul and New York City.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,
Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992

 

Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1991

All rights reserved

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Parts of this book first appeared in The New Yorker and The Gettysburg Review. Some early traces of it appeared in three New Yorker stories entitled “WLT (The Edgar Era),” “Friendly Neighbor,” and “The Slim Graves Show,” and I stole a few lines from “The Tip-Top Club,” which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly. All four stories later appeared in the Penguin edition of Happy to Be Here. I am grateful to Peter Stitt for his invaluable help with the manuscript and to Kathryn Court, who edited it, and to Caroline White, who assisted her. For the Ole and Lena jokes, I am indebted to the Ole and Lena jokebooks by Red Strangland (Norse Press, Sioux Falls, S.D.).—G.K.

 

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

ISBN : 978-1-101-57270-2

 

 

I
learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live that life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

 

—HENRY THOREAU,
WALDEN

S
tudio B was the snakebite studio at WLT, the tomb of the radio mummy, and bad things happened to people who went in there. It was a big triangular room on the second floor of the Hotel Ogden, where WLT was located, at 12th and LaSalle in downtown Minneapolis. Dad Benson said it felt like a vacuum chamber—once, he gasped for breath during
Friendly Neighbor
and two huge flies dove into his throat and almost choked him. The Rev. Irving James Knox claimed he couldn't hear himself talk in there when he did
Hope for Tomorrow
. He was used to sanctuaries where his words rolled off the walls like ocean surf; in Studio B, the waves hit a big sponge. Reed Seymour once got the hiccups so bad in there his partial plate came off and he had to gum the news. And a week later, three of the Shepherd Boys, a gospel quartet, slipped in and quietly de-pantsed him during a long account of a tragic house fire leaving 6 Persons Dead in St. Paul. He kept reading but he yipped twice when they pulled off his shorts. Every other day or so, the Shepherds snuck in during
The Noontime News
to play their little tricks: they put spit in his water glass and pelted him with food and poured mucilage in his shoes and one day they lit the script on fire and he had to read very
fast
—it was an obituary and he never got to the
Survived by
part—so the next day, Reed locked the studio door. Then, after the newscast was safely delivered,
the door wouldn't unlock,
and they kept him in there, frantic, whanging on the walls, until the pee ran down his legs. That was the sort of thing that happened in Studio B.