Pontoon - A Novel of Lake Wobegon

Garrison Keillor

Viking Press

2007

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-11: 0670063568V

In this novel, Keillor's first Wobegon fiction since Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 was published in 2001, we meet Evelyn, a good church-going Lutheran, a devoted mother, a serious quilter. Only after she dies in her sleep as she always wished she would, do we find out that she has been living a secret life. She's been in love with Raoul, a Las Vegas man who took her dancing and showed her the joys of life outside Lake Wobegon.

Then, there's her daughter, Barbara, who struggles with her drinking and, inspired by her mother's unconventional life, decides to dry out and thumb her nose at the Wobegon establishment by carrying out Evelyn's final wish: to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over Lake Wobegon from a pontoon boat.

We also meet Debbie Detmer, a veterinary aromatherapy millionaire, who has returned home to Wobegon from California with her troubled, uncommitted fiancé in the hope that a lavish wedding with Moet and shrimp shishkebab will save them. But the plans for a Pontoon boat wedding, with the hot air balloon hauling a singing Elvis in for the finale, go terribly wrong.