Why do you like Garrison Keillor?

I like him because, behind the folksy appeal of his show, lurks a fierce intellectual firefighter, as you can see when you read his articles. He's Chomsky dressed up as Santa. Bill Moyers is like that, too -- a nice uncle who can get very fierce.

1. A Prairie Home Conundrum
The mysterious appeal of Garrison Keillor.
By Sam Anderson

It is time for us to sit down, as a culture, and have an honest talk about Garrison Keillor. It's no use trying to ignore him anymore: He is upon us. Keillor's empire—a folksy, benevolent force—has flourished in holy obscurity for more than 30 years on public radio. He has come to represent a crucial schism in the national taste—the Great Continental Divide between sarcasm and earnestness, snark and purity, the corrupt and the wholesome. The mere sound of Keillor's voice—a breathy baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers—is enough to set off warfare between the generations. Last week the collective tension tightened when, armed with roughly half of America's cinematic firepower (Altman, Streep, Harrelson, Lohan, et al.), the Keillor empire rolled into movie theaters . Despite slight distribution, the film sneaked into the top-10 weekend grossers. ("Garrison's audience," Robert Altman told the New York Times , "is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience.") And yet the movie made some people crazy with hostility . How has someone so relentlessly inoffensive managed to become so divisive?

Keillor has, through three decades of canny self-marketing, turned himself into a kind of EveryMidwesterner. When he started as a writer and radio host in the early 1970s, America's major regions had all been thoroughly mythologized—there was Faulkner's Mississippi, Steinbeck's California, and everybody else's New York. But the Midwest was, relatively speaking, a blank slate. Like Faulkner, Keillor invented a fictional territory—a mythical Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve"—and dedicated his career to exploring it. (Wobegon is a little like Yoknapatawpha County, but Midwestern—i.e., with all the murder, rape, class warfare, and incest translated into gardening, ice fishing, and gentle boyish hijinks.) Wobegon allowed him to be both culturally specific—every story is loaded with landmarks and proper names—and yet free from the tyranny of fact. He honored his native culture by gently mocking it, an approach that ingeniously echoed the region's ethic of self-deprecating pride. Once Keillor settled on this subject and tone, his career became an impressive and sustained display of the Protestant work ethic: He now hosts two radio shows (in addition to A Prairie Home Companion , a 5-minute daily segment called The Writer's Almanac ), writes frequent essays for periodicals, and has produced a small library of books (novels, poetry anthologies, memoirs, political invective, children's stories).

Keillor's flagship franchise is still A Prairie Home Companion , a weekly two-hour radio variety show that debuted in 1974 to a live audience of 12 people and now draws more than 4 million listeners a week across 600 stations. For a variety show, Prairie Home is remarkably invariable—its elements (skits, songs, humorous poems, catchphrases) cycle in and out of the program as predictably as the seasons. The highlight of every show is Keillor's career-making innovation: the so-called "News From Lake Wobegon," a pointedly unthrilling 20-minute monologue full of childhood tomato fights, drunk preachers, Norwegian bachelor farmers, Minnesota weather (God designed the month of March "to show people who don't drink what a hangover feels like"), and sentimental rhapsodies about the precious things in life. Keillor delivers the news in a kind of whispery trance. When he speaks, blood pressures drop across the country, wild horses accept the saddle, family dogs that have been hanging on at the end of chronic illnesses close their eyes and drift away. The segment always ends with the achingly familiar line, "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average." And then a storm of rapturous applause.

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" But judging Keillor by mainstream standards of comedy (compression, originality, edge) misses the point. He works hard to be unfunny in a very particular way. His humor is polite, understated, and deliberately anachronistic; it never breaks a sweat. He is happy to sacrifice mass appeal to preserve what he sees as grown-up honesty. "I think that past the age of thirty there is no obligation to be clever at all," he once told the Paris Review . "Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever." (For the record, Keillor turned 30 in 1972, two years before he started his radio show.)

Within the decorous, irony-lite boundaries of his shtick, Keillor is very clearly a genius. His range and stamina alone are incredible—after 30 years, he rarely repeats himself—and he has the genuine wisdom of a Cosby or Mark Twain. He's consistently funny about Midwestern fatalism ("We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle," he recently told an interviewer. "And if you should ever feel really happy, be patient. This will pass."), and he's a masterful storyteller.

Though Keillor is associated with the Midwest, his sensibility comes largely out of New York City. He began his career in the early '70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine's Golden Age aesthetic: sophisticated plainness, light sentimentality, significant trivia. He was inspired to create A Prairie Home Companion, in fact, while researching a New Yorker essay about the Grand Ole Opry, and we might think of the radio show as his own private version of the magazine, transposed into a different medium. The "News From Lake Wobegon" is basically an old-style Talk of the Town piece about the Midwest.

Keillor the writer often stands in sharp contrast to Keillor the radio persona. When he steps offstage and removes his bowtie, the transition seems to activate a surprising, and often fierce, critical intelligence. In January he published a viciously funny front-page essay in the Times Book Review accusing the French author Bernard Henri-Lévy of intellectual sloppiness in his efforts to grapple with America. With Twainian flair, Keillor turned Henri-Lévy's own stylistic excesses against him. It was impossible to imagine the piece in his radio voice: The thought was way too fast and sophisticated. The critique was so spirited because Keillor's approach to America is the exact opposite of Henri-Lévy's: whereas the Frenchman (according to Keillor) is "short on the facts, long on conclusions" and possessed by a "childlike love of paradox," Keillor is always deliberately long on facts, short on conclusions. He avoids paradox and all other forms of rhetorical cleverness, and he prefers anecdote to explanation. He'll name 34 different garden vegetables and nine generations of Inqvist children before he'll offer anything that might seem like a generalization.

It may be that Keillor is so allergic to Henri-Lévy's love of paradox because, though he'd never acknowledge it, his own public image is deeply paradoxical. He's a cosmopolitan provincial (he's lived in Copenhagen and owns a multimillion-dollar apartment on Central Park West) and a sophisticated simpleton (a plainspoken yarn-spinner who just happens to write world-class prose). Once you start thinking about this—once Keillor's trademark simplicity begins to look complicated and unnatural—the paradoxes start tumbling out like herrings out of the pickle-barrel: His plainness seems pretentious, his anti-bombast bombastic, his anti-snobbery snobbish. This sense of affectation is why some people instinctively dislike such a likable entertainer.

Keillor has called radio "an underground reality," and despite his decorum, there's something of the rebel in him. To non-fans, it's a bit cocky how openly out-of-step he is with the pace of modern life, and there's something aggressive in his gentle jingles about rhubarb pie and powder-milk biscuits, his ever-present uniform of bowtie and red sneakers, and his relentless nostalgia. Without saying it outright, Keillor projects himself as a sage—a kind of Wobegon Obi-Wan spreading the revolutionary creed of premodern simplicity. This willful simplicity (he titled his two poetry anthologies Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times ) is annoying because, after awhile, it starts to feel prescriptive. Being a responsible adult doesn't necessarily mean speaking slowly about tomatoes. It can also include things like irony and cleverness, and even yelling into your cell phone about sitcoms.

Although Keillor is in almost every way the polar opposite of Howard Stern, they are working on similar projects. They've engineered personae to shake listeners out of what they see as unhealthy modern diseases—in Stern's case, the plague of sexual repression; in Keillor's, our addiction to television, the Internet, glibness, and distraction. Both men are shock jocks, Keillor is the shock jock of wholesomeness.


2. Where All the Rooms Are Above Average -- by JOYCE WADLER

DON'T bother with a rental car, Garrison Keillor told a visiting reporter, I'll pick you up at the hotel. At 10 a.m. his old green Volvo pulls up to the Saint Paul Hotel, where the logo for his movie happens to be plastered on the room key cards, and Mr. Keillor, in Saturday jeans, loads the suitcase in the car.

His one-on-one voice — at least when meeting a stranger — is identical to his radio voice, so that getting into a car with Mr. Keillor is like falling into a radio show. When the visitor misses a statue of Lucy, of the comic strip "Peanuts," he circles the block, then moves into a story.

"Charles Schulz was from here," he begins in that low-key, we'll-just-mosey-along-here voice that has never suggested any fear of dead air on the radio, that more likely thinks dead air in these crass and frantic times may be a good thing. "He was pretty well miserable here. Adolescence hit him really hard. He was all pimply and scrawny, and he was rejected by the local newspaper when he had this great idea for a strip. They ... umm ... they just didn't think it was any good. And he felt they rejected him because he was from here, he was local. And he was probably right.

"It was one of the great bonehead mistakes of American journalism," Mr. Keillor continues, in a voice that suggests there have been many and that he has endured the consequences of one or two himself. "He got on a train and he went to New York or Chicago, off to United Features, and they took him in their arms. And he was very lucky. Forever after."

Mr. Keillor is the creator and star of public radio's "Prairie Home Companion," which has inspired a film of the same name. It stars Mr. Keillor, was directed by Robert Altman and opens nationally next week.

The radio show deals with life in Lake Wobegon, a fictitious Minnesota town of hardworking people and old-fashioned values. But anyone who thinks Mr. Keillor lives in a simple little house on the prairie is in for a shock.

His home is a great Georgian pile atop the swankiest neighborhood in town, with 13-foot ceilings, seven bedrooms and a circular staircase of such beauty and scale that had Rhett Butler been a Midwestern boy he would have found it quite suitable for hauling Scarlett up the stairs. (If it seems doubtful that a Midwestern boy would ever do such a thing, you should know that Mr. Keillor's love life once inspired a good deal of the local Sturm und Drang, and that he has been married three times.)

The house is so grand that Mr. Keillor and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, a violinist in the Minnesota Opera orchestra, feared their friends might consider them pretentious for buying it. Ultimately, the beauty and spaciousness of the house, which was built in 1914 by the French architect Emmanuel Masqueray, persuaded them.

They are not, however, the sort of people who spend three days fretting about the right shade of grout. The instruction they gave R. Thomas Gunkelman, a Minneapolis interior designer, was to make the house comfortable, child-friendly. (Mr. Keillor and his wife have an 8-year-old daughter.)

The house contains cherished items like a framed letter from E. B. White. There are three pricey custom rugs, patterned with pumpkins and churches, a reminder of their hometown. But as Mr. Keillor and a reporter walk through the house searching for designer furnishings or heirlooms, there comes a point when Mr. Keillor goes into his closet and starts pulling out his clothes.

"This is an heirloom," he says. "This is a suit I've had for 25 years at least."

He wears red socks with his red sneakers, and if a face can be said to be rumpled, Mr. Keillor's is it: a face perfect for radio. Although the film "A Prairie Home Companion" opens shortly, he does not seem to be the sort of fellow who feels the need to shill for his product. The feeling he seems to project is it is in somewhat poor taste.

And if you bring up the subject of Meryl Streep, one of the film's stars, you get a much more articulate version of the so-fabulous, just-a-regular-guy statement that is inevitable in an interview of this sort.

The roles themselves, as Mr. Keillor was the script writer, bear some attention: Ms. Streep plays a histrionic singer who has been jilted by Mr. Keillor's character, G. K., and who berates him for refusing to talk about it.

"Meryl Streep is royalty, she is the reigning queen of American moviedom," Mr. Keillor begins, in his radio voice. "And when you encounter someone of her stature, you are a little trepidatious that she may turn out to be less than you hope and your heart will be broken, and she does not and she does not. She turns out to be an amazement. She's smart and wildly funny and she's irreverent, especially about herself."

Was there much improvisation?

"It's a lovely myth, but what people take for improvisation is simply very good acting," he said. He moves into a voice one recalls from a Lake Wobegon tale about a haunting. "She had me in her wave field, she had me in complete control, I was a complete automaton. When Meryl Streep's eyes are locked on you, you do her bidding. I was in her force field."

A dry, ironic sense of humor, a good manner and a reticence to talk about personal matters are what you get with Mr. Keillor. Having worked as a journalist, he will permit himself to be badgered about why he gave up his radio show for a spell: He had married a Danish woman who was miserable in St. Paul and they moved to Copenhagen. There was, it will turn out, rather more to it than that, but we are starting a tale in the middle, which Mr. Keillor would never do, and so to his beginnings.

He was born in Anoka, a rural town about a half-hour drive from St. Paul, one of six children. His father was a carpenter and postal worker, and built the family home, a small Cape, almost entirely by himself. What this meant was that for a few years, until the upper two floors were built, the family lived in the windowed basement. It was quite cozy, Mr. Keillor said. His family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist group that discouraged dancing, card-playing, going to movies.

"A Prairie Home Companion," which spoke of a place in which the women were strong, the men were good-looking and all the children were above average, was begun in 1974. It made him famous and rich. Did his parents consider him a success?

"Success means different things to different people," he says, with a tight little smile. "We didn't go to movies when we were children, so the fact that I'm now in a movie is not necessarily a source of unalloyed joy."

Did his father disapprove of his life in show business?

"It was not brought up," he said. "They were very polite."

MR. KEILLOR'S first marriage ended in divorce and produced a son, now with children of his own. Mr. Keillor later had a long relationship with his show's producer, Margaret Moos.

After an Anoka High School class reunion in 1987, Mr. Garrison fell in love with Ulla Skaerved, whom he had known long before as an exchange student. He spoke beautifully of their love on the radio, but his Minnesota public, loyal to Ms. Moos, was not entranced. After he married Ms. Skaerved, a local newspaper published a front page picture of the newlyweds' home, including the address and the sale price. Mr. Keillor, who calls the matter "ancient history" when a reporter brings up the matter and now insists it had nothing to do with his decision to leave St. Paul, sent an angry letter to the paper, shut down the radio show and moved to Copenhagen.

Within a few years, his marriage to Ms. Skaerved was over, Mr. Keillor was broadcasting a radio show not dissimilar to "A Prairie Home Companion" out of New York, and he had met Ms. Nilsson, who had also grown up in Anoka.

"I'm sort of a quiet, vaguely gloomy person, and she's very effervescent and she's very bright," he says. "She's very open and voluble where I'm not."

They married in 1995. After their daughter, Maia, was born, in 1997, the couple brought her back to St. Paul to meet the family, then decided to move back for good.

"We were staying in the Saint Paul Hotel," Mr. Keillor says. " My parents came up, and my aunts and uncles and a couple of sisters-in-law and my sister and everybody just sat in a circle and passed this infant around. She was sleeping. And it was very touching. So I wanted her to know these people. You can't hire aunts and uncles."

Mr. Keillor had by then bought a large log cabin on 80 acres in a remote, wooded area in Wisconsin. Too remote, says Ms. Nilsson, who remembers an ice storm during which their car spun out and kept them from making it to their house. "The car went like this," she says, making a circle with her finger. "It was well over a mile, and the temperature was dropping dramatically."

"Not a near death experience by any means," Mr. Keillor says.

"Sure felt like it to me," Ms. Nilsson says.

"Then Jenny had an encounter with the deer," Mr. Keillor says.

"That was the end for me," Ms. Nilsson says. "This huge dead deer, smashing into the car. People were stopping and offering to drive me home, and I said, 'No, no, my husband will be along any minute.' He drove right past. Never turning his head."

"I was brought up not to stare at people pretending to need help," Mr. Keillor says.

The St. Paul house was purchased in 1998, for $710,000. They will continue to maintain a Manhattan apartment; they are purchasing a two-bedroom on Central Park West that they sold in 1993.

Wait a second. They are buying back an apartment they sold 13 years ago? How much is that going to cost? "We'll gloss right over that," Ms. Nilsson says.

"We've always stayed invested in New York real estate, so the money we sold it for, we put into the next apartment; we're riding the tide with all the rest of you," Mr. Keillor says.

The specifics: Mr. Keillor bought it for $800,000 in 1987, sold it for $1.5 million in 1993, and is buying it back for $3.5 million.

Is there much heartache there?

"No," Mr. Keillor says. "I always sort of regretted selling. It's a chance to recoup one's regret."