Garrison Keillor’s new novel, “Boom Town,” is an odd book, an example of autobiographical fiction, or perhaps merely of hubris.
It opens with the narrator — a 79-year-old former radio host named Garrison Keillor who left his job under a cloud — returning to Lake Wobegon for the funeral of his old friend Norm Gunderson. The town has changed; it’s booming with an influx of young entrepreneurs, vegans, yoga practitioners and folks who drink wine at $21 a glass.
Bunsen Motors and Krebsbach Chev are gone. The Chatterbox Cafe has changed its menu to include healthier items: more vegetable pad thai, fewer roast beef sandwiches. Lots of the old folk are dead or have moved to Florida.
The narrator says he’s just an observer of the changes, “a mere stenographer,” but it’s clear where his sentiments lie. “The town feels lively and prosperous and so what if the old culture is dying off,” he says, a bit wistfully and perhaps bitterly.
Norm has bequeathed to him the old Gunderson family lake cabin, a place where the narrator spent a magical summer between high school and college. He recalls in sensuous detail the long days reading Thoreau and learning about sex with Norm’s sister, Marlys, who — it is apparently important to note — made the first move and spent most of the summer wearing nothing more than a green bikini.
At summer’s end, he drove off in his 1956 Chevy to attend the University of Minnesota. “I was eighteen, had tasted gin and made love to a girl. … I was a man,” he says, and you do not get the sense he is being ironic.
Poor Marlys, though, ended up in a mental institution and is now in a care center in Eau Claire, Wis.
