Liberty Garrison Keillor Faber & Faber, 288pp, £14.99

Endless parade

When we talk about an author's voice, we never mean the sound produced by his larynx and shaped by his tongue and teeth and nose and lips. And if ever we do hear the author of a loved book reading aloud, like as not we are disappointed. The voice in the prose is inevitably much bigger. Garrison Keillor may be the single living, English-speaking exception to this rule among writers of fiction. When we talk about Keillor's voice, we mean his actual throat-made speech: deep, honeyed, slightly nasal, slightly breathy, authentically reflecting the higher latitudes of Middle America and yet cunningly extra-timbred to suit the demands of radio. Once heard, never forgotten. We've all had the pleasure of cruising in the roomy back seat of his big American voice to the small town of Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and all the children are above average. And if you haven't, then you have a treat coming.

Mark Twain is always cited as his guiding light, because Keillor's characters are Ur-American provincial, his wit is bone dry and his ear for the vernacular is keen. But surely William Faulk- ner's intricately imagined Yoknapatawpha County, mined in volume after volume, throws a (welcome and intensifying) shadow at least as long. Twain tended to send his small-town heroes out on journeys into the wider world (Huckleberry Finn down the Mississippi, a Connecticut Yankee to the court of King Arthur, his own self across Europe) while Faulk­ner confined his characters inescapably, bound them together and rooted them implacably in a very particular soil.

Whatever his lights, Keillor has managed to perfect, through his radio sketches over the years, a pitch-­perfect tone: always gentle, constantly chiding but never shrill. His characters never enfeated hypocrisy, nor entirely overcame their deep suspicions of foreigners and of pleasure, yet they themselves were never entirely defeated, either. Tounges in check they endured, and ­always politely. In fact the sketches were like ­sermons, not in praise of God in this instance but of human kindness and dignity. And yet, for all their gentleness, their comic timing was ­always sharp and their punchlines were ­always funny.

Keillor's books are funny, too, and in their way aimed at the same targets, but in print he allows himself a few luxuries that on air he never dared indulge too deeply: bitterness and sex and firearms. This is not an untainted boon, for as we cannot help but hear Keillor's gentle radio voice in his hero's mouth, so we must also hear it utter sour grapes, which jar. At first, in any case. In the initial few chapters, the jokes are thin and the good people of Lake Wobegon are often derided, as sour, dour, soreheads, bitter chip-on-the-shoulder Catholics, dark Lutherans who, if you are lacking misery, can supply you with all you need, and much more. Soon enough, however, we arrive at the reason for the rancour: this is a tale of mid-life crisis, so cannot help but spit; like a cup of proper espresso, without the bitterness it would not taste true.

Once Keillor establishes the ground rules-even though we are in Lake Wobegon, the good-looking men have cocks, the strong women have breasts and bushes, people fuck, resentments boil and not all of it happens off stage-he ­rewards us with some longed-for sugar lumps. Such as the circus sideshow exhibit of Donald and David, the Minnesota Twins conjoined at the hip, famous for not speaking to each other for 23 years. People pay 50 cents admission in hope of persuading the men to make up: "Come on!" they would say. "Just look at him! Put your arm around him!" After that, the plot gets moving in earnest and we happily go along for the ride.

It's the 4th of July and the hero, Clint Bunsen, has transformed the local parade from a drear procession of bachelor farmers on tractors to a vast, all-singing, all-dancing spectacular that draws 30,000 (to a town of 2,182 souls) and is viewed by more than 57 million on CNN. Clint takes pride in his accomplishment but the locals resent it like hell. There's also a beautiful woman who has trouble keeping her clothes on, and she's from out of town. This very enjoyable book reads not only as a ­bittersweet tragicomedy of lost chances and found graces, but also as a life-and-death struggle between an author and the characters who have sustained him over these many years. The Wobegoners want Keillor to remain at home in quiet obscurity; he wants them to release him and praise him as he flees; the story ­being well told, we find ourselves rooting for both sides. Like all children, Keillor is free to leave his progenitors, just so long as he takes them with him.

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