Garrison Keillor – Pontoon A Lake Wobegon Novel – Audio Book – Capsule Review

Though a weekly listener of A Prairie Home Companion and the News From Lake Wobegon as well as a collector of Garrison Keillor CD sets, I am not a fan of his novels. Lord knows I have tried but I find them somewhat badly written and rambling. The solution might just be the audio book version, as I have discovered listening to the latest (2007) novel by Garrison Keillor, Pontoon A Novel of Lake Wobegon in its 7 CD audiobook format.

Pontoon A Lake Wobegon Novel by Garrison Keillor is the slow congruence of two rather strange events on a Saturday afternoon. The first is the dropping of a bowling ball containing the ashes of stalwart citizen Evelyn Peterson into the lake. The second is the declaration of love ceremony organized by Debbie Detmer who is returning beau in tow to Minnesota’s after some fifteen years in California. These two events, scheduled at the same time though nobody realizes it, involve a hang glider, a hot air balloon, Wally’s pontoon boat, and a flying Elvis. Near the end of the novel, Keillor throws in forty agnostic Danish Lutheran ministers on some kind of penance trip to Minnesota.

Pontoon A Lake Wobegon Novel is great fun when read by Keillor in this 7 CD audiobook set. It sounds much like a series of connected studio version News From Lake Wobegon segments though the pace is a bit slower, the story somewhat darker, and the language a bit more risqué. Some sections do little to move the story forward but though this may be a weakness in the book version, it is not that bad when told by Keillor.

Like many audio books, this one features rather whimsical track and CD to CD separations. Nothing too annoying although a couple of the Pontoon CDs seem to end mid paragraph.

Pontoon – A Lake Wobegon Novel
Garrison Keillor
Audio Book Read by the Author
HighBridge Audio 2007
7 CDs 8 Hours

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