When Garrison Keillor visited London recently on a book tour, Martin Wroe talked with him about his latest novel, Wobegon Boy, his attitude toward his fundamentalist roots (Keillor was raised Plymouth Brethren), and his Christian faith. Keillor also gives a tantalizing preview of his current work-in-progress: a novel about Lake Wobegon's hapless baseball team, the Whippets, and the catalyst for their first winning season in 40 years.

One reviewer said a problem with Wobegon Boy is that it reads like a novel written in 100-yard dashes.

Well, yes, that's true. I hope the reader starts the next dash, forgetting that he just ran a previous one. I do think that it is impossible to write a comic novel as a single long take simply because a person can't be funny for a long time. We know this. People have tried, some of them at parties I have attended. Comedy is a series of short takes.

With a collection of stories, you can end your relationship with a character once you feel they have run out of interest. With a novel you must continue to make something or someone interesting to the reader for a long, long time. That is the great challenge, and it is an even greater challenge if you have a character, as I do in John Tollefson, who is not all that interesting.

Comedy is not about people who are alienated or estranged or filled with grief. Comedy is about ordinary people. And people who are privileged in some way. It is difficult to write comedy about people whom one pities. But those are really the sorts of characters that many readers prefer: people who have suffered terrible wounds in childhood and who have been able to overcome this through meditation or through truisms, through listening to one's inner self, or whatever one's mantra is—and who then went on to earn vast sums of money. That territory is not my bailiwick. I'm all for it and I'm all for people writing books. Literature is a great democracy, but those aren't my people, and in the end, deep down, though it's none of my business, I don't really believe in their means of redemption.

What is their means of redemption?

It is a kind of secular religion of self-help that is very popular in America because it is very easy. Whereas Christian theology is a matter of great mystery—which one can struggle with all one's life—nobody struggles over this secular religion. It is religion of self-gratification, almost always, in which the self is the highest authority. All illness and all personal difficulty come from conflict within one's self.

You've been critical of the Religious Right in the past, but in Wobegon Boy much of your fire seems to be directed at believe-nothing liberals.

What is often referred to as political correctness in America I refer to as pietism, a kind of secular pietism. John Tollefson is very wary of pietists—those unctuous figures who say the things that they feel one ought to say in matters of faith and belief. John is intolerant of such talk, mainly because it is boring. He is tired of going to parties at which people stand around and lament in predictable ways all the expected things. One of his complaints is that it gets harder and harder to put on a good party at which people put aside their pieties and hurl themselves over the cliff and onto the rocks of regret or whatever—but at which they have a good time.

What is God like?

We don't know that. God is beyond our knowing. He is not beyond our pursuit and our devotion, but he cannot be encompassed. That is my catechism answer to your catechism question.

But what has your pursuit of him revealed to you—because you remain in pursuit, don't you?

Yes, from time to time.

We must know more than that he is unknowable.

Yes, of course we do, depending on which texts we are led to believe. And if one is led to believe the New Testament, he is a God of judgment and a God of kindness and we swing between these two poles, and his judgments are unbearable and his kindness and grace are unmeasured.

Even after your early succss, you described yourself, wryly or not, as a fundamentalist.

I don't know what else I could be. But I doubt that fundamentalists would consider me a fundamentalist.

Can you throw out the bathwater of fundamentalism without letting go the baby of faith?

Well, one struggles with that, and it is not an easy question. It's very difficult to throw off beliefs that were inculcated in you as a child. You don't want to believe that it is only because they were inculcated in you as a child that you adhere to them, because the Bible does not describe faith as a kind of hereditary thing. But even if you reject the faith in which you were raised, those childhood memories remain potent. There are a lot of fundamentalists who go around haunted by their past; it's a dog who comes out of the dark once in a while and chases them.

Often, if they are writers, those "haunted" fundamentalists or ex-fundamentalists are hostile about their past. But in your case, it is a very affectionate portrayal. For example, in the funeral scene in Wobegon Boy, it's clear that whatever John now believes as a grown-up city-dwelling sophisticate, he is ultimately not at odds with the faith of his fathers.

No, he's not, though I don't think one would describe that faith as fundamentalist. But his younger brother Ronnie goes off with a fundamentalist group of the Pentecostal variety. Their view of the world is dark, apocalyptic. It's based on a misreading of Scripture, but it has always been strong in America, particularly among poorer people, the oppressed and downtrodden. They're sure that the Second Coming is imminent, will take place at any moment, the next breath. It will mean that the entire established order of this world—society, culture, and wealth—will be overthrown in an instant, and they as members of the elect will be raised up and will be in positions of power, and the people who are in power now will be weeping and gnashing their teeth. Are they right or are they wrong? You'll have to wait and see, won't you?

When I interviewed you in the mid-1980s, you said you'd stopped going to church. With the passing of the years has the habit returned?

Oh, I go, I go. I went, was it last Sunday? Yes, with my daughter, and I felt so lucky when she started to make a fuss just as the sermon began. I had to pick her up and carry her out, so I got to miss the sermon, which is usually the low point of church. My wife is an Episcopalian, and I tend to accompany her. We were married in an Episcopal church. She is more fond of the high Anglican end and I am more fond of the lower end of the American Episcopal church. She was a member for a while of Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in New York, a great Gothic place on Fifth Avenue. They have a boy choir arrayed in little ruffled collars, and they usually have a rector who, if not actually English, would like you to think he was or could have been. So he does the homily, you know, up in his nose.

Christianity seems to do better in America than in Europe these days, where in many countries it is in serious decline.

Well, it's more novel in America; we haven't had it so long. But why it succeeds—or does not—may have less to do with people's own efforts than they suspect. I think that the attempts of the church to modernize its message and to look and sound more contemporary are almost always foolish and counterproductive. The church is a great mystery, and there is only so far that one can go in stating the mystery in terms that do not deny its mystique.

You once said that it's infinitely easier to be a writer than to be a Christian. Do you think of yourself as a Christian writer?

I don't, although I wouldn't argue if others did. It's not a helpful distinction to me. If I were gay I wouldn't want to be considered a gay writer, and I don't think most gay writers really care to be categorized that way, or that most African American writers care to be identified first and foremost as "African American writers." They're certainly proud of being African American and proud of being writers, but the combination of the two is too much baggage. What does it mean to call yourself a gay writer? That you are writing for gay people? That you are not comprehensible to heterosexual people? That's what such distinctions tend to imply. They limit your audience in an way that most writers would be loath to do. We are above all professional, and a professional writer accepts any audience and has an equal obligation to every reader. I think that's the ethic of every writer.

But your work remains haunted by themes of faith and doubt.

Well, I should hope so, You wouldn't want to be able to dispose of something as interesting as that. This is baggage that no writer should wish to be shed of.

You've said that you're already well into your next novel. What is it about?

It's set in Lake Wobegon, and it's about the baseball team, the Lake Wobegon Whippets, a pitiful team that's been losing miserably for the last 40 years. They have a winning season, a brief ray of sunshine and hope—which is then followed by an even greater decline. But the story centers around their winning season, and in particular, a woman groundskeeper, the manager's daughter. She comes back home for a year, and simply because she needs something to do for the summer she becomes the groundskeeper, a vision of beauty who mows the grass. Lust inspires the team, pure lust for this young woman who rides back and forth in her red bikini. They all lust after her in their hearts, and they become winners because they are willing to endure any amount of pain or whatever else it takes to get her attention.

So it's a novel about the fact that women are responsible for most of what men will ever achieve. It's really to impress women that men write books or act or sing or play games. If it weren't for women and our need to impress them, even long after giving up any actual designs on them, we'd be leading very different lives.

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