Liberty: A Lake Wobegon Novel - Hardcover

Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its thirty-first year on the air. He is the author of seventeen books, including most recently the New York Times bestseller Pontoon.

Clint Bunsen just turned 60, which, after 37 years married to his childhood sweetheart, turns out to be a dangerous age. He’s regretting having come back home from California, where he was set to go to art school after a hitch in the navy, those many long years ago. It was supposed to be a farewell visit, but Irene enticed him to a cabin, and in those days (1970s!) in central Minnesota, conjugal relations mandated marriage. Furthermore, Clint has used the Internet to contact last year’s Miss Liberty in Lake Wobegon’s annual Fourth of July parade, and one thing led to another to a motel night of ecstasy, and now, damned if he doesn’t want to take her up on fleeing to San Francisco with her, especially since Viola Tors bushwhacked him out of chairmanship of the parade committee, the only thing about Lake Wobegon he still enjoyed. Of course, wanting is simple, and doing isn’t. Liberty has much the same shape, that of a pell-mell rush to a pyrotechnical climax (this year’s parade), as the last Lake Wobegon chronicle, Pontoon (2007), which was so memorably wacky and affecting that it’s hard to believe the new one follows it by a full year. We should be grateful, though, since Liberty’s almost as funny and definitely as moving. --Ray Olson