Liberty: A Lake WobegonNovel By Garrison KeillorFaber Faber 267pp, £16.99
DURING HER various campaign-trail stump speeches, Alaskan demagogue Sarah Palin frequently invoked a place she called "the Real America".
She didn't need to enumerate the salient characteristics: Palin's Real America, we knew, was midwestern, Republican, small-town, second-amendment just-folks. It was apple-pie and Uncle Sam.
It probably looked a lot like Lake Wobegon, Minnesota (population: 2,182; town motto: Sumus quod sumus, "We are what we are").
Lake Wobegon (former home of "the largest talking fish replica in the country") is a place where conversation is "formal, almost liturgical", where people say, "Oh sheesh," and "Go figure", where "nobody . . . would ever say, 'Wow, that is great!!!!!!!'", and where, under the dreamy auspices of 60-year-old car mechanic Clint Bunsen, the annual July 4th parade has taken on sacramental overtones, to the displeasure of the town's contingent of "dark Lutherans who believe that life is misery and if it doesn't seem so just now, be patient".
Libertyis the latest of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon novels.
Keillor, whose folksy, politically astute column appears in The Irish Times, has been chronicling the adventures of the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon since the early days of his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.
From his perch in St Paul, Minnesota, Keillor has recreated the flyover-state small town of his childhood and adolescence, beginning with the nostalgic historical pastiche of Lake Wobegon Days (1986).
Lake Wobegon has become an American institution - and, for Keillor, a remarkably versatile means of exploring the big issues of American life and culture.
The lion's share of Libertytakes place during "Chairman of the Fourth" Clint Bunsen's final independence day parade, the disasters and near-disasters of which coincide with the climax of Clint's midlife crisis.
Clint is a Republican - he voted for George W Bush - but he isn't a neocon; he's a small "c" conservative who believes that "each individual is complicated and mysterious and has a lot of meanness which is programmed into us and can't be wished away".
Clint is the veteran of a 32-year marriage to his high-school sweetheart Irene - "a waspish tomato grower who has been sort of pissed off at me for years".
Clint is almost - but not quite - paradigmatic of Palin's "Real America". And the difference lies in his flirtation with liberty - in the form of Angelica Pflame, a 28-year-old yoga instructor who performs in the parade as "Miss Liberty" and who appears as "a breath of light-heartedness in [Clint's] metric life".
Libertyis about what happens when the "Real America" - traditionalist, conformity-bound, straightforward and proud - meets a brash, uncontrollable American modernity.
Lake Wobegon, in this novel, isn't quite what it used to be.
Clint's son Chad plays "a video game called Unbalancedin which you burst into college classrooms and gun people down".
Anxiety medication has arrived in the Real America, with the result that "nowadays you ran into more and more residents of Lake Wobegon who seemed mellower, more laid back, even semi-vacant".
Angelica treats Clint to a "chakra reading". And, at the edges of the July 4th parade, a peculiarly 21st-century paranoia makes itself felt: cops hand out flyers that say, "Watch for strangers who appear to be nervous or agitated and glancing around".
Keillor's prose - laid back, watchful, generous - takes note of these developments, but doesn't insist upon their primacy. The book is filled with beautifully balanced, semi-surreal detail, and Clint's story is hedged around with unstressed political significance.
But the novel's final paragraph is given over to the voices of the Wobegonians themselves. It's a moving moment, and it reminds you, sweetly, of a real America that has nothing to do with the "Real America", but rather with people getting along - with each other, and with the ordinary business of life.
Kevin Power's first novel, Bad Day in Blackrock, was published recently by the Lilliput Press