Lake Wobegon Days (1986)

‘Wobegon’, from the Native American ‘the place where we waited all day in the rain [for you].’

Part history, part reminiscence, and part short story collection focused on Lake Wobegon, a fictional small town somewhere in the overlooked middle of Minnesota, in the overlooked middle of America, in the overlooked middle of life. Lake Wobegon Days grew out of the humorous stories told by Garrison Keillor on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Most of the book contains versions of these stories, little windows into the lives of the people who live in the town, but it is padded out with whimsical and sardonic local history.

It has been a quiet week

In 1978 the BBC changed the broadcast frequencies of its national radio stations (Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4). As part of the publicity drive to make sure no one missed the cricket scores, they issued a set of little diamond-shaped stickers for the tuning dial of your radio, to remind you of the new frequency. As dutiful BBC listeners, my family added the stickers to the radio in the kitchen; and, honestly, we needn’t have bothered. Because once we’d found the new frequency for Radio 4, the tuning on that radio never, EVER changed.

We were a Radio 4 household. From the moment my mother got up in the morning to the moment she went back to bed, from The Today Programme to Book at Bedtime, there was a radio on somewhere in the house, and that radio was tuned to Radio 4. I grew up in a house of comforting, long wave voices, warmed by the bakelite and valves of Broadcasting House and hissing with the weather over London: Brian Redhead, Jenni Murray, Derek Cooper, Corrie Corfield. Everything we did — meals, housework, games — was accompanied by an ethereal chorus of financial experts and foreign correspondents.

And American humourists: because in 1986, Book at Bedtime broadcast Garrison Keillor reading extracts from Lake Wobegon Days, and he fitted in perfectly. His husky, languid, avuncular voice, the drawn out lilting twang of his accent, the gentle melody of his sentences: this was a voice made for the airwaves, a man who surely looked like the speaker grille of a radiogram. The stories were gentle too: little vignettes of small town life, with small stakes and small import.

Keillor has described himself as ‘America’s tallest humourist’, and that comic understatement and use of the word ‘humour’ are key, although his use was so understated as to be missing a ‘u’. ‘Humour’ was the dominant mode of Radio 4 comedy. This meant things that wouldn’t actually make you laugh, but were undemanding and bearably amusing; a background gurgle of cheerful satisfaction to burble along with whatever you were actually paying attention to. Comedy doesn’t have to be confrontational, despite what American stand-ups with worrying personality defects would have you believe. But ‘humour’ is always cosy. Like all comedy it relies on common understandings and culture; but it plays with those understandings gently, aiming for the knowing chuckle of recognition rather than the startled bark of surprise.

Not that Keillor can’t be funny. He can make you laugh out loud with his word choice, sentence rhythm or just the splendid comic situations. But it is a very cosy kind of funny: a wood-panelled, leather-covered funny, chummy and apparently unthreatening.

It is also quite clever, another thing that helped it fit into Radio 4. The common understandings and culture it played upon were educated and metropolitan. This is particularly true in the early part of the book, which gives a fictional history of the town of Lake Wobegon. Keillor is parodying American small town histories, and he relies on the reader knowing about French voyageurs, patterns of late nineteenth century immigration to the States, and East Coast literary culture.

This fictional history tells us that the town of Lake Wobegon was originally named New Albion (another way of saying ‘New England’); perhaps this is why it slipped so seamlessly into Britain’s flagship speech radio station. The joke has another level though, this time about the US’s relationship with Britain; we’re told that as Lake Wobegon gains immigrants from other parts of Europe, from Germany and Norway, it adopts a (humourous) new name of Native American origin, and becomes a distinctly American place.

Keillor is also parodying the form; many of his jokes lie in the structure and niceties of local histories. The book is full of wonderful footnotes (one of which is 20 pages long), ludicrous diversions and whimsical grace notes. Altogether, then, the tone of Lake Wobegon Days is distinctly that of the American middle class intellectual: people who read (or write for) The New Yorker, people who wear tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, people who watch Woody Allen films and drink small drinks in dark, wood-panelled bars in big cities.

This tone was very distinct from the tone of Reagan’s America that we Brits perceived dimly from across the pond: a tone that was all sunshine and DayGlo, go-getting and self-aggrandising, ‘greed is good’ and ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Compared to grey and seedy mid-’80s Britain, the Reagan tone felt foreign and strange, and it provoked both contempt (for its brashness) and envy (of all that sunshine, money and giant plates of food). As teenagers, we largely consumed this tone via a loud, queasy TV show called Entertainment USA. Its British presenter, Jonathan King, has since been convicted of serious sexual crimes; but even before that, you could instinctively tell he was a wrong ‘un, and some of his slimy, malicious inauthenticity rubbed off on the teenage British Gen X perception of the States.

Lake Wobegon, the book and the town, stood against all that. As the book has it: ‘Lake Wobegon survives to the extent that it does on a form of voluntary socialism with elements of Deism, fatalism, and nepotism. Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism, and it runs on loyalty.’ For all its parody, Lake Wobegon Days extols community and mundanity rather than Reaganite brashness and hucksterism. Where our vision of America in the ‘80s was all television (so many channels! So loud! So exciting!) this was radio. The sound of home, of comfort and of recognition.

Where all the children are above average

This comfort of home and recognition is the comfort of childhood. For all the joking in the book, it contains a deep strain of nostalgia for the storied childhood of the American Boomers, all long golden baseball summers and crisp, magical Christmases, white picket fences and kindly neighbours, Dad away at some ill-defined ‘work’ and Mom in the kitchen baking apple pie. This is the normality the Boomers rebelled against when they joined college protests (before they sold out by going into advertising after their first divorce); and this is the the normality that, by the ‘80s, they worried would be denied to their latch-key Gen X kids.

But the Boomer rebelliousness is in there too. Lake Wobegon Days is full of pretentiously intellectual teenagers (all male) chafing against normality. The footnote that runs to 20 pages is a list of gripes from one of them about how his parents’ politeness and ordinariness has stifled his creativity. Many of these teenagers, after all, are Keillor himself.

Keillor was born plain old Gary, but uses Garrison to denote his authorial voice. That ‘-son’ is a sonorous, distinguished East Coast appendage: Dickinson, Emerson. The book itself is a rebellion, after all, a metropolitan jest at the expense of the upwardly mobile author’s down-to-earth small town origins. The inhabitants of Lake Wobegon are unlikely to be reading Lake Wobegon Days. But Keillor makes fun of himself too, in the form of all those anxious young men. Their notions of sophistication always turn out to be laughably unsophisticated and their literary aspirations mere pulp. But their angst is real.

While Keillor’s sideways perspective may seem a little snipey, the small town mentality is hidebound and stifling, and all too often objectionable. Take ‘the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers’. Keillor makes great play of these uncouth, unmarried lunks with their terrible manners and antisocial attitudes but, while they might be outsiders in the eyes of the town, in many ways they typify the stolid, unpretentious, hidebound spirit of Lake Wobegon. Moreover, as Clarence Bunsen points out, they are kin to the ambitious and rebellious young men: ‘the bachelor farmers are all sixteen years old. Painfully shy, perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall, watching the parade through the eyes of the last honest men in America: ridiculous.’

Outsiders in ‘80s Lake Wobegon they might have been, but now the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers are the presiding spirit of America; their watchword ‘tellwitcha’ — ‘to hell with you’ — is now the country’s motto. Minneapolis may have voted for Harris, but the rest of Minnesota, the rural parts where Lake Wobegon might be, voted Trump. Stearns County — home to Holdingford, the ‘most Wobegonic’ town in Keillor’s words, which now bills itself as ‘The Gateway to Lake Wobegon’ — voted for Trump by a margin of two to one. The metropolitan jest has, over the years, grown stale.

‘The Lake Wobegon effect’ has become a shorthand for illusory superiority, the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities. It’s named after Keillor’s customary radio sign-off: ‘That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.’ (It’s is a close cousin of the ‘Dunning Kruger effect’, the phenomenon where the less someone knows about a subject, the more confident they are of their ability to master it.)

It’s tempting to look for the Lake Wobegon effect in contemporary politics, or perhaps in the Baby Boomer generation themselves; but there’s a wider possible application. Most of the studies into the phenomenon of ‘illusory superiority’ have been done in the States. Researchers have found no evidence for it in East Asia, for instance. There, they have found, instead, a consistent underestimation of competence. Perhaps, after all, ‘illusory superiority’ is merely a description of being American; a state that not even the most wholesome, most whimsical, most humorous inhabitants of Lake Wobegon can avoid.

---

Of course some Radio 4 comedy could be very funny indeed: