A Prairie Prodigal and a Saturday-Night Sabbath

And if Keillor has despoiled his Brethren upbringing, it is also true that his Brethren upbringing probably robbed Keillor of his earliest ambitions. He speaks often of his boyhood dream to write for the New Yorker, and he identifies most deeply with the persona of the serious writer. He did write for the New Yorker, and he has published a shelf of books, but his work inhabits the page uneasily: his novels are uneven, and critical reception has been cool at best. Part of this failure lies in the nature of the work itself; Keillor's humor strays toward ripeness on the page, where it is straitened by his deadpan delivery onstage. And of course his work, more than any other, literalizes the metaphor of a writer's "voice": without the depth and soul of that dark, dark voice, his stories seem curiously vacant of content. But the deepest failure of Keillor's writing, I would suggest, comes from the intractable contradiction between the model of the literary writer to which he aspired—outsider, alienated, subversive, driven by a personal vision—and the communal ethos from which he could not, ultimately, escape.

I, for one, am grateful for this failure. Keillor's stories mean more to me on the radio than they ever could on the page. And more than his stories, his songs. If Keillor's writing voice lives uncertainly on the page, his singing voice also wavers and strays, but this only infuses it with life and significance. Keillor sings because he loves to: in duets, in ensembles, with witty-made-up lyrics or venerable texts, in harmony whenever possible, and hymns most of all. It has been observed that "A Prairie Home Companion" resembles a church service in its structure, with the monologue as sermon. If this is so, then his harmonies around the microphone are certainly the purest kind of prayer. Keillor encounters grace in the musical communion of congregational singing, which brings a motley band of sinners into an ineffable intercourse with truth and beauty, which for a moment orders time and cosmos, which makes a sacrament of unison and moving parts. This is how I, too, encounter God, and so I thank the tall prairie prodigal for a lifetime of Saturday night Sabbaths.