WLT: A Radio Romance

5 out of 5

By Kyle Massey on Jun 5, 2011

You've been warned: there's a lot of sex in this book. Not graphic, clinically-detaled stuff, but a ton of innuendo, almost right from the beginning. If you're looking for the feverishly wholesome Garrison Keillor from his NPR show, you won't find him here. And in my book, that's a good thing. The first two Keillor books I ever read were this one and The Book Of Guys, and WLT is still one of my all-time favorites. It traces the unlikely rise and inevitable fall of an imaginary Minneapolis radio station, from the mid-1920's to the dawn of television. Much of the book exists to juxtapose the smarmy on-air content and the smutty behind-the-scenes doings of various station personnel. Everybody's sleeping with everybody else at WLT, it seems, including (especially?) station co-owner Ray Soderbjerg, who actually hates radio, and often dispenses puritanical, and hypocritical, station rules. The angelic Little Becky is a twenty-something, foul-mouthed chain-smoker; sweet-voiced, relentlessly chipper singer Lily Dale is really Ray's polio-ravaged and morbidly obese sister; the sanctimonious radio minister is a philandering bum; all played to hilariously bizarre extremes. About a third of the way through, we finally meet what passes for a main character: Francis With, a North Dakota boy who loses his father in a train wreck, and who spends the rest of his unhappy childhood dreaming of a career in radio. (This is a recurring theme of Keillor's: radio as the only friend to generations of lonely kids). Aside from the raunch factor, the most striking thing about WLT is its darkness. Lake Wobegon might pick up WLT's signal, but its cheerful, white-bread inhabitants are only in the background, lapping up the cheeseball prgramming the station dishes out (let's face it, a lot of that "Golden Age Of Radio" stuff was unspeakably lame). Keillor is a guy with a lot of "issues" apparently: just look at the character of Vesta, Ray's wife. My favorite scene is in the later stages of the book, Francis (now calling himself Frank), careening through the wintry night on a tour bus with a quartet of boozehound, horn-dog gospel singers. Strip away the big phony smile, and it's a dark, seedy, painful world, and Keillor makes you feel like you're there.