John Tollefson left home 20 years ago and is beginning to suspect that was a mistake. Having broken through the "40" barrier, he enters a state of midlife questioning, accentuated by hassles at his work as manager of a public-radio station, financial instability resulting from a problematic investment, and uncertainties about the long-term prospects of his relationship with a woman with whom he is smitten.

So he makes two trips home: first, to escape the temptation to infidelity while his lover is in Denmark, and then for his father's funeral. His hometown restores his sense of values and stimulates reflection on mortality. There is no shortage of deaths for him to meditate on, from the sudden death of his father on the basement stairs holding a bag of frozen peas, to Richard Hansen's fatal crash after a truck accidentally spills a load of bananas onto the road in front of him, or Jim Tuomey's murder in a muddy farmyard in the middle of the night, wearing only a paper hospital gown.

All this high drama makes for good comedy, because John's hometown is Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor's fictional creation that represents the moral center of the American Midwest. It has been ten years since the last annals of life in Lake Wobegon were published. Lake Wobegon Days (1985) outlined the history of the town, describing its citizens and their exploits. Leaving Home (1987) gathered tales of how the strong women, good-looking men, and above-average children filled their quiet weeks in the Minnesota backwater. Now Wobegon Boy combines the concerns of both these books by zooming in on John Tollefson, who appeared as an awkward adolescent in the first novel.

Despite being a 300-hundred-page sprawl with oral roots, Wobegon Boy hangs together. In fact, it works even for those who are not devotees of Lake Wobegon. For the aficionado, there are walk-on appearances by familiar friends, hilarious one-liners, and the requisite tall tales. Still, our comprehensively unheroic hero complains, "I have no coherent story to my life. I am part of no struggle, have nothing at stake. … My only story is my childhood back in Lake Wobegon."

Keillor has been chided for creating a town insulated from modern realities; we don't meet any real-estate entrepreneurs, for example. One of the questions on "Post to the Host" at the Prairie Home Companion Web site was why there were no gays in Lake Wobegon. The characters in the stories are loosely sketched and are slightly altered according to the needs of the story. It is no big deal if 40-year-old John Tollefson does not quite square with the teenager Johnny. (I could have sworn, for example, that John was a blood relative of Val Tollefson, the somewhat sanctimonious Lutheran deacon who features in several of the early tales. Val does not even rate a mention in Wobegon Boy.) The one stable character is Lake Wobegon itself. It is what it is, as the tautologous town motto proclaims, and its significance would be altered if it were to be updated by having a multicultural center built beside the grain elevator or high-rise condos at the lake shore.

Keillor assumes that readers are already familiar with Lake Wobegon, and so by page six young Tollefson has departed for New York State—a letdown for the many who would like to linger in the fictional town. This is not the story of a Wobegon boyhood but of the rest of the life of a Wobegon boy. An apt subtitle might be "Lake Wobegon confronts postmodernity."

For John Tollefson to fit credibly into contemporary society, he needs to be partially reinvented so that he is linked to Wobegon mores but stands in a neutral relation to the factions and personalities of the town. He has to merge convincingly into modern life, thus depriving Keillor of a favorite comic device, namely, recognizing Wobegonians out of their home environment by giveaways of appearance, manner, and behavior. Still, this approach allows Keillor to display another side of his humor: the precisely modulated satire and deadpan urbanity characteristic of his New Yorker articles and essay collections.

The largest suspension of disbelief required by this book is to accept that, given their upbringing, John and his siblings could have become the people that they are. John himself is not entirely unlike a Flambeau, one of the family whose adventures constituted his childhood reading and filled his fantasies. His sister Diana is a lesbian, busily keeping in touch with her feelings and committed to a process of becoming. Brother Ronnie, after a colorful career, has taken up with a strange sect who look forward to Texas becoming a millennial paradise.

These characters are products of a new world. Older generations survived as pioneers, through world wars and the Depression—"Make the most of what you're stuck with and you'll do okay. That is the Lake Wobegon philosophy." The present generation has lost itself in narcissism, escaping from aimlessness into any facile distraction that comes along. The prime example in the novel is Steve, who is into anything that can be called alternative, from drugs to geodesic domes to meditation, and who fleeces John of his savings with casual aplomb. The vignettes of present-day society are richly satirical. John, while deriding the excesses he sees others adopting, is a product of his time, lacking direction, a prey to angst, bamboozled by both the glamor and the meretriciousness of modern living.

And so he goes back to Lake Wobegon. No other word reverberates so strongly throughout the Wobegon mythology as home. The archetypal movement behind the tales is one of return, either metaphorical or real. One of John's friends reviews his career: "I did the Lutheran thing. I came back to what I knew." After his father's funeral, John goes east again to his own house to find that "it did not feel like a homecoming, but like a return to an outpost. It was not my home. It was a station."

Lake Wobegon resonates in the imagination as home not as in cozy cliches that home is where the heart is, but because it functions as a source of enduring values. It is to Keillor's credit that he seems to go out of his way in Wobegon Boy to divest Lake Wobegon of any aura of sentiment or nostalgia. The town we experience through John's eyes seems overendowed with grumps, bores, crude eccentrics, and the downright stupid. The tone stops short of total mockery, but it is utterly unromantic. And yet, it is after having been immersed again in Wobegon life that John gets a grip, cuts his losses on his failed money-making venture, gives up the job that is demanding too much compromise, and, after months of dithering, decides to get married.

Throughout the novel there are recurring ironic references to the proverbial sayings, the maxims and tribal wisdom that govern Wobegonian behavior. The very first paragraph lists the town's Four Spiritual Laws: "Cheer up. Make yourself useful. Mind your manners, and, above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself." The subtext of these precepts might be summarized as "how not to be narcissist."

The ultimate root of Wobegon's ethics is biblical, but this goes unacknowledged. Wobegon Boy positions itself differently from other Wobegon stories with regard to religion. Here such references are much more muted. The Dark Lutherans and the Happy Lutherans are amusingly compared, but otherwise the church's presence and influence receive little attention. Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility features only to let us know that the Blessing of the Snowmobiles is to take place. John's father's funeral service is described, but the Bible verses and hymns are mixed in with the ritual of the Sons of Knute and communal singing of "Come and Sit by My Side If You Love Me." Lake Wobegon, forgotten by time and unimproved by the decades, cannot by definition become secularized, so the reason for the shift of focus is a matter for debate: a concession to the modern reader? a symptom of John's kicking over the traces? a change in Keillor himself?

At key points, however, the reader is expected to read between the lines. John is irritated and exasperated by his father's obsessions, and his matter-of-fact mother does not go in for overt displays of emotion; yet in the end we intuit the underlying bond of affection among them all. In "Let Us Pray," a particularly fine story among the many that are stitched together to form this patchwork novel, Keillor counterpoints the petty tribulations of the congregation—the women toiling at domestic chores, the men hyperanxious in case they are called upon to pray in public—against the epic sufferings of Job in Pastor Ingqvist's sermon.

Wobegon Boy concentrates on the foreground and removes the backdrop—the congregation without the sermon—leaving the reader to fill it in if desired. Keillor has not always chosen understatement. The wonderful 1984 story "Gospel Birds" is a tour de force that builds from the ludicrous show by the performing birds to a genuine and moving climax, held in balance artistically through the framing viewpoint of Lyle, the skeptical science teacher and—would you believe—a Tollefson. The audience at the Gospel Birds' performance becomes aware "of a great love that seemed to abide in the world and that upheld them and supported them as if by invisible hands … a presence in the world that lifts all of us up."

That "presence of grace" undergirds the Wobegon universe. John Tollefson listens to his Uncle Henry's story of his family and sees in it a "saga of exiled Wobegonians losing their moorings" and wonders if his own family has not succumbed to the same fate. The metaphor is picked up again in the novel's epiphany. Having lost his job, John consoles himself by making the perfect hamburger to the strains of a Haydn organ mass, music and food being for Keillor/John chief among the good things of life.

I cranked up the volume for the Sanctus, the polyphonic voices like two sets of waves rocking an anchored boat from two directions. … How lucky I am, praise God—how fortunate to have fixed points, like oarlocks, from which to fulcrum yourself forward through the water.

The greatest moments in the best stories bring Keillor's characters to such a realization. Over 50 years ago, Norman Rockwell created a potent image of freedom from fear in the sleeping children watched over by their parents, secure from the threatening newspaper headlines. Similarly, Lake Wobegon lingers in the imagination as the home to return to and cast anchor in the values that most matter. The American Dream has inverted itself and is located in the safe haven that surrounded us in early infancy.

The ear receives words truly weighted whereas the eye can skip over them too quickly. The reader must slow down to savor phrases that are quintessential Keillor. "You can't outsmart life," reflects John. "The only answer is to be loved so that nothing else matters so much." Anyone else would have peddled the increasingly empty nostrum that to love is the essential thing, whereas for Keillor it is to "be loved." Scurrying around in search of self-realization is futile. Far wiser to appreciate what you already have, to accept what is richly given and too readily taken for granted. The cardinal virtue in Wobegon Boy is cheerfulness, a fitting response to the discovery that all that is most worth having is there for the taking—what John's Lutheran ancestors called "grace." Blessed indeed are those who know that what they have is more than they had any reason to expect!

Wobegon Boy opens with, "I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it's all thanks to a good Lutheran mother." Self-knowledge, good cheer, gratitude, and clear-sightedness about what life is like are all packed into this first sentence. Just as Thoreau by Walden Pond simplified in order to reveal the good life to the nineteenth century, so the members of the community by Lake Wobegon moor themselves to life's prime essentials and tacitly counsel their contemporaries: Trust God. Be thankful. Enjoy.

Joy Alexander is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at the Queen's University of Belfast.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.