Every morning, Garrison Keillor walks up two flights of stairs to his office at the top of the house, where he writes about -– well, that’s the question. Is his newest Lake Wobegon novel, “Pontoon,” about a hilarious funeral and the lure of chocolate liqueur, or is it about the meaning of existence and the nature of love?
“Philosophy is not my line of work, nor psychology,” demurs Keillor, adding as an aside that his tangled romantic history makes him “the last person who should write about the nature of love.” Yet he does say that the beauty of fiction is that he can address the big themes while writing about “a small town and its residents … all the effluvia of the most ordinary days. I love the ordinary, and love is extraordinarily ordinary.”
“Pontoon” is a novel based on a monologue that Keillor has told many times on stage. “So, as I was writing it, I was hearing myself do it for an audience, and hearing a couple thousand people erupt into laughter. The trick is to go deeper into the joke without losing it.” For Keillor, the act of writing is “a desperate need for conversation, somebody to tell secrets to. In my case, that would be the reader.”
So, readers of “Pontoon” can ponder life with him as Evelyn Peterson’s ashes are packed into a bowling ball, and muse on love as Evelyn’s grandson parasails into the sky. They may also consider the nature of home when Debbie Detmer returns to Lake Wobegon for her wedding.
“Half of all songs are about wanting to leave home and the other half are about wanting to return,” says Keillor, who has moved around a lot – “the result of a fear of tedium” – but now is settled in Minnesota where his daughter can grow up around relatives. “I still get twinges of restlessness, but it is not conducive to the writing life.”
Quiet, though, is conducive. “I’ve become a big fan of silence,” says Keillor. “Yet here I am in radio. This is like a beef farmer turning vegan.”
While Keillor doesn’t listen to audiobooks because his in-house commute is so short, he says, “We tend to remember better what we hear; I believe that students would get a clearer idea of literature if they heard it instead of looking at it on the page.”
He occasionally reads his day’s work out loud because he can only hear what “clunkers” some words are when they’re spoken. “You can work hard on a paragraph and keep stitching it together and ripping out the stitches and moving the pieces around, and then you read it out loud and you throw away everything but one sentence. Don’t waste the reader’s time: that’s basic. Don’t go to sleep on the page. Reading it out loud is a good way to wake yourself up.”
And then there is the process of reading the final work aloud in the recording booth. “It can be agonizing,” he groans. “There are always some rough spots that you desperately wish you could change.” Mischievously – “So maybe you change them in the audio. Who’s going to notice?”
But might they notice the hand signals? Keillor famously paces while giving his monologues on stage, so, we asked, how does he handle a cramped recording booth? Evidently, he walks back and forth in performance to work off nervous energy, which he says can also be accomplished “simply by waving your hands. I do a lot of gesturing when I read into a microphone. You’d be surprised.”