Garrison Keillor's "Pontoon" has heart and strong women

One sure sign of a deeply pleasurable book is the compulsion to read it aloud until family members threaten to brain you. Good thing, then, that my wife and daughter were out of town when I read "Pontoon." I'd be a goner for sure.

"Pontoon" (Viking, 247 pp., $25.95) is Garrison Keillor's first book since 2001 about his most famous creation: Lake Wobegon, the town "that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." Lake Wobegon stories are the heart and soul of "A Prairie Home Companion," Keillor's brilliant public-radio show. But before he got famous on the airwaves, Keillor was a writer, someone in love with the printed word. "Pontoon" proves that his authorial chops are still plenty strong.

After a cheerful night out with the girls, elderly Evelyn Peterson dies — in bed, while reading. Keillor speculates that she told the angel of death to wait until she'd finished, but he took her anyway, "leaving behind the book, her bed and the blue knit coverlet, her stucco bungalow ... redolent of coffee and fresh-picked strawberries, her bedside radio, her subscription to the New Yorker paid through the end of the year."

Evelyn was an upstanding Lutheran and an enthusiastic quilter, who did a decent job of raising her kids despite an unhappy marriage. She was cheerful, forthright and blessed with simple tastes; a good person, in short, but seemingly not all that remarkable.

Then Evelyn's daughter Barbara, while going through her things, finds evidence of a very different person. For many years, Evelyn carried on a passionate affair with Raoul Olson — familiar to generations of Minneapolis TV watchers as Yonny Yonson, host of a popular children's show.

(Longtime Seattleites will recall a local Scandinavian analog in the much-loved kids' show host Stan Boreson, who played the accordion and sang tunes like "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas.")

Raoul and Evelyn met just before he shipped out in WWII; by war's end, she was married to someone else. But they reconnected and — on the sly — Raoul started taking her dancing and for long vacations. All those times Evelyn was away, supposedly visiting relatives? Guess again.

Inspired by the news of her mom's secret life, Barbara decides to stop drinking. (It was becoming a problem.) She also arranges Evelyn's final wish: scattering her ashes over Lake Wobegon. Enter Barbara's college-age son, who decides to use a parasail for the job.

Meanwhile, Debbie Detmer, a local girl who made a fortune in Southern California with aromatherapy for pets, is back in town, planning to marry her distracted yuppie boyfriend. The lavish wedding beside Lake Wobegon is set to include copious amounts of champagne and shrimp kebabs. (This menu, in a town famous for its tuna hot dish and Jell-O salads, elicits some agitated and baffled conversation.)

Then Debbie decides that pontoon boats shaped like giant ducks — they belong to the fraternal order of the Sons of Knute — would be perfect for the ceremony. And then she schedules the wedding for the same day as Evelyn's airborne funeral.

If you're thinking along the lines of a collision course and a spectacular climax to these intertwined stories, you're right. And I haven't even mentioned Raoul's surprising revelation. Or the flying Elvis.

This book is not all whimsical shaggy-dogness. It takes up serious themes as well: Barbara's loving way with her brain-damaged daughter, for example, or her poignant thoughts on mortality. Like the best of Keillor's stories, "Pontoon" balances the goofy and the reflective in perfect measure.

Adam Woog reviews crime fiction for The Seattle Times.