Liberty By Garrison Keillor

For me, opening a Garrison Keillor novel is like approaching the holiday season, when all the Christmases of your childhood are still alive and well in your heart, untainted by reality. I go to Lake Wobegon to escape, to imagine a place where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Those Midwestern Norwegians get up to their antics, sure, but the worst problem in this sleepy town is getting a seat at the Chatterbox at lunchtime so the waitress, Darlene, can pour you a cup of coffee and you can catch all the local gossip.

Liberty, though, is like the Christmas when your parents are screaming about the turkey, your drug-addicted brother doesn't come home and you're worried that if something doesn't start going right, somebody is bound to pull a gun. And that person just might be you.

Someone does pull a gun in Liberty, a rare occurrence in a Keillor novel, unless it's dosed with the proper amount of humor. There's less humor here, though, than plain old whining. The woman packing heat is Irene Bunsen, whose husband, Clint Bunsen, has been carrying on an affair with the town's Fourth of July parade's Miss Liberty. There's nothing especially attractive about Miss Liberty, although Keillor mentions her flat stomach at every turn, and she doesn't even seem to like Clint despite sleeping with him on occasion, even running off to California with another man. Yet, Clint spends most of the book pining after her. The rest of his musings are devoted to the life he might have led had he stayed in California after getting out of the Navy, lo, those many years ago. The men of Lake Wobegon are family men who don't ditch responsibilities out of boredom and have no regrets. Sure, they have their quirks and insecurities, or the novels would be without humor. But Keillor has veered far from his tried-and-true formula with Liberty, and I wonder why. I can go just about anywhere for existential whinings; I go to Lake Wobegon to get away from all that. You don't go to your vacation home to worry about the plumbing.

Finishing the novel was also like Christmas. Closing the back cover, I understand that in order to keep the myth -- of idyllic small town life, of happy family gatherings -- alive, I need to forget everything that just happened.