WLT: A RADIO ROMANCE; by Garrison Keillor; Viking; $21.95.
Garrison Keillor's first novel is my first brush with him. I missed "Lake Wobegon Days" because homespun Midwest humor wasn't something I was itching to read at the time.I had the same feeling when I picked up "WLT: A Radio Romance," but Keillor hooked me early with the premise of radio in its infancy and how it might have been.
Keillor turns his Minneapolis microcosm, station WLT, into a raucous romp through 21/2 decades that ran head-on into television in the 1950s. Inevitably it finally leads to second-banana status for a bawdy cast of characters who find instant fame through the low-brow curiosity value of radio in its prime.
They are the kinds of improbable, eccentric characters who could have been borrowed from a Larry McMurtry novel - among them a foul-mouthed child star, a blind baseball announcer who makes up his play by play, womanizing gospel singers who "tune" their voices with whisky and Lucky Strikes, and a shy North Dakota listener whose life and love of radio threads itself into the real and radio lives of the rest of the cast.
Keillor's narrative unfolds with a sense of comic timing suited to some of radio's favorites, Burns and Allen, Amos and Andy, Jack Benny. These are the kinds of talents missing at WLT. In some markets, radio may have been a lightning rod for the best of culture. At WLT it is a clumsy, haphazard and relentlessly bawdy affair. The station was founded by brothers Ray and Roy Soderbjerg to publicize their struggling sandwich shop. The call letters stand for "With Lettuce and Tomato."
The sandwich shop becomes a greasy afterthought when radio takes off, especially when the Soderbjergs guiltily succumb to popular demand by allowing commercial sponsors for their shows.
On the air, Keillor's characters tend to be as sweet and sappy as North Woods maple trees, charged with upholding the loose standards and "principles of radiation" in WLT's broadcast code. But when the mike is off, or supposed to be, they fight, cuss, drink and - who knew Keillor harbored such thoughts - indulge in enough sex to turn Harold Robbins green with envy.
Keillor seems tuned into the offbeat and off-color side of his audience. And why not? Woody Allen already did the warm, tender version in Radio Days. In some hands, Keillor's version might be offensive, but he makes it as poignant and prophetic as the strait-laced uproariousness of the best scenes in Anne Tyler's "Breathing Lessons."
In the process, WLT becomes a winking metaphor for greed, corruption and sublimation of the best instincts of broadcasting in America. And Keillor allows one of Ray's guilt-ridden do-gooders to say just that: "This could have been the Acropolis, and you made it a bazaar."