Once upon a time, many years ago, in what now almost seems like another life, I spent a year in the American mid-West. Not in Minnesota, where this novel is set, but in Iowa, which is the next southernmost state. It was a happy time in my life and I have always had a warm feeling about that rather empty, often bleak part of the world, with its extreme temperatures (freezing winters, humid summers, no spring or autumn to speak of). It's surprising, then, perhaps, that I have never before read any of Garrison Keillor's novels. Of course I have heard him occasionally on the radio -- only the other day he was interviewed on BBC Radio Four -- but somehow I never got around to the books. I might never have done if I hadn't entered a draw on dovegreyreader and won this book. I must be on a roll, I think, as it's only mid-January and already I have made two great new discoveries, Muriel Spark and now Garrison Keillor.
Pontoon is set in a small town, Lake Wobegon. The novel starts with a death and ends, more or less, with a funeral of sorts. Does this sound depressing? It is about as far from that as it could possibly be. The person who dies is 82 year old Evelyn, a woman of the most enormous appetite for life. A great traveller, an enthusiastic walker and exerciser, warm, generous, outspoken, she dies in her sleep, as she had hoped to do.
"And when people heard about her death, they stopped what they were doing and stood, hands at their sides, and felt her absence. A tall tree had crashed to the ground".
That's the end of the first chapter. The rest of the novel tells about the effect of her life, and her death, on those around her. Mainly the book focuses on her daughter Barbara who has not been happy for many years. Divorced, a quiet alcoholic, she misses her two children, one at university and the other a girl, brain damaged at birth, being cared for by nuns. But it is not too much to say that Evelyn's death liberates her. Her first discovery, shortly after she has found her mother's body, is that Evelyn had a lover, Raoul, someone she had met again many years after a brief love affair when they were both in their early twenties. Barbara starts to look at her own life, and decides it is time to make some changes. The vodka goes down the sink and she starts to plan the send-off Evelyn requested -- which involves among other things putting her ashes inside a bowling ball and dropping them into Lake Wobegon. The end of the novel does indeed describe this, which is the most astonishingly glorious, funny, heart-warming event you could possibly imagine.
If you want to laugh, maybe cry a bit, and come away feeling that life can be good and that there is much to look forward to if you grab it and make the the best of it, this is the place to go.
