Review: Garrison Keillor's Leaving Home

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Jun 15, 2001

A Closer Look at Keillor’s Leaving Home

It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone. Dale, the son of Jack and Bobbie Walters, left Lake Wobegone shortly after graduation to join the Navy. "It's a wonderful thing to push on alone toward the horizon and have it be your own horizon and not someone else's. It's a good feeling, lonely and magnificent and frightening and peaceful, especially when you leave someone behind who will miss you and to whom you can write."

The passage above expresses the theme and mood of Garrison Keillor's book Leaving Home, a collection of short stories which appears at first to be a collage of entirely unrelated sketches. Though at first glance the stories appear unrelated, they are unified. For example, each short story, first composed for radio, retains its introductory by-line: "It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone." The unity in the collection of stories goes beyond the first line, however, thematically, many selections portray characters contemplating their departure from the small-town, Mid-Western mythical city of Lake Wobegone. The narrator reminisces about yearly trips to the State Fair; Darlene (Darlene Makes a Move) leaves for Minneapolis to track down her errant husband; Grace Campbell and her children (Royal Family) leave the scrutiny of Lake Wobegone for St. Paul. Some, like Florian and Myrtle and Roger and Cindy Hedlund, leave Lake Wobegone, only to turn around and go back. Others, like Senator K. Thorvaldson (Corinne) comes up from Florida to visit his sister-in-law; Barb Diener, a.k.a. Marnie Montaine, (The Killer) returns to strut her stuff after landing a single line in a bad film, and, in the selection, The Exiles, the exiles, distant-dwelling children and grandchildren of loyal Wobegonians return for Christmas. Finally, among much side-splitting humor, there runs a thread of bittersweet poignancy, creating a mood that characterizes the stories in the collection. The introductory quote, taken from Dale, exemplifies Keillor's use of an un-named, omniscient narrator who interprets the experiences of characters struggling to leave Lake Wobegone, often against the wishes of their family and friends.

Wobegonians portrayed in this book are characters that readers of Keillor's other novels, Lake Wobegone Days (1985) and Wobegone Boy (1997), will be familiar with, yet the format of Leaving Home (1987), is entirely different from the aforementioned novels. While Wobegone Boy is narrated by the central character, John Tollefson, who incorporates stories of his hometown in the form of musings or flashbacks, Leaving Home is narrated by an unknown storyteller. Most of the tales are told from the third-person omniscient point-of-view, but a few selections, like State Fair, The Killer, and Homecoming, are told by the narrator in first-person point-of-view. Frequently the narrator interrupts a tale to interject his own commentary or insights. One particularly comical interruption occurs in the short story Collection, after Clarence Bunsen's character experiences chest pains and struggles to recall warning signs he had read about in Reader's Digest. Fortunately for Clarence, his pain dissipates, "there was no story, and Clarence felt better." The narrator interrupts the tale to muse: