Tom Bodett is the Motel 6 guy that's the way most of us have heard of him, signing off those radio commercials with "We'll leave the light on for ya."
To have listened to radio at all in the past three years is almost certainly to have heard that honest, creaky Midwestern voice talking about how cheap and friendly those Motel 6 places are, with fiddle and guitar in the background.But Bodett also is rapidly becoming known, as well, as the voice, and author, of the End of the Road, a weekly series of hourlong radio shows, syndicated on 150 stations nationwide. Now the first couple dozen episodes have been put into book form: "The End of the Road" ($16.95; William Morrow and Co., $16.95).
In a recent interview, Bodett said comparisons with Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion radio show and book, "Lake Wobegon Days," are inevitable.
Although, as he put it, fame has "sort of snuck up on me," he still doesn't know how to answer media questions about those similarities, except to say that he's doing what most writers do: inventing characters and talking about what happened to them.
"I've been a fan of Garrison's for a long time. Everybody gets compared to somebody who went before. Garrison has been compared to (novelist William) Faulkner, to name one that springs to mind. It's a convenient literary tool, to create a set of characters. It's been done," he said.
But Lake Wobegon, located somewhere in Minnesota, is completely imaginary. Bodett's town of "End of the Road," in Alaska, is in part the real town of Homer, Alaska, Bodett's own home town.