WLT: A Radio Romance

by Garrison Keillor

In the spring of 1926, the Soderbjerg brothers, Ray and Roy, plunge into radio and launch station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) to rescue their failing restaurant and become the Sandwich Kings of South Minneapolis. For the next quarter century, the “Friendly Neighbor” station produces a dazzling array of shows and stars, including Leo LaValley, Dad Benson, Wingo Beals, Slim Graves and Little Buddy, chain-smoking child star Marjery Moore, and blind baseball announcer Buck Steller. Francis With, a shy young man from North Dakota, entranced by radio, gets into WLT through his uncle Art and quickly becomes the Soderbjerg's right hand. Soon Francis is a budding announcer adored by Lily Dale, the crippled nightingale of WLT kept hidden from her fans, whose firing contributes to the downfall of the station. And then comes television.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Historical Fiction, Novels, American Fiction, The United States Of America, American

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He created the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion (called Garrison Keillor's Radio Show in some international syndication), which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion comic skits. Keillor is also the creator of the five-minute daily radio/podcast program The Writer's Almanac, which pairs poems of his choice with a script about important literary, historical, and scientific events that coincided with that date in history.
In November 2017, Minnesota Public Radio cut all business ties with Keillor after an allegation of inappropriate behavior with a freelance writer for A Prairie Home Companion. On April 13, 2018, MPR and Keillor announced a settlement that allows archives of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer's Almanac to be publicly available again, and soon thereafter, Keillor began publishing new episodes of The Writer's Almanac on his website. He also continues to tour a stage version of A Prairie Home Companion, although these shows are not broadcast by MPR or American Public Media.

Reviews

[Lauren Hills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I have read parts of the Bible, I always imagine God to talk in this author's voice. Also, there should be a law passed that Garrison Keillor is the ONLY man allowed to talk on the PA system at planetariums.

[John Rodkey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps Garrison Keillor felt he needed to balance his depiction of tranquil, bucolic Minnesotan life in the Lake Wobegone books. Perhaps he felt the need to say things in a book that he couldn't say on the air in his radio show. Perhaps he was simply expressing frustration at the dwindling influence radio variety shows have had over the past 5 decades. Whatever the reason, WLT is a novel ostensibly centering on the coming of age and developing romance of a young North Dakota boy as he breaks his way into radio and ultimately T.V. as radio's prominence fades. Garrison laces this novel with violent and vulgar sexual depictions of 'real life' that are so over the top we must recognize it as anti-Lake-wobegonesque. The bitterness toward the clergy and radio administration also find extreme expression here are only hinted at in the Lake Wobegone series.
Yet there are moments of tenderness and insight, and Garrison has not lost his noted ability to communicate. I'd suggest taking a pass on this book, and listen to a couple podcasts of old Lake Wobegone classics instead. You won't be missing much.

[Bill Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure here: I love this book because I enjoy Garrison Keillor's work, and because like him I love the romance of radio as it was. For a few years in my youth REAL rock and roll arrived in my small town-- they were big on Beautiful Music and Easy Listening there, and Baptist church services on Sunday-- after dark, when the AM powerhouses like CLKW and WCFL would start to come in. The Grand Ole Opry (which is still on) from WSM, too, and KYW in Philadelphia, which was the novelty of news 24 hours a day.

Within a couple years FM exploded (or rather the ongoing FM explosion reached us, even where I was). Whatever music you favored, you had many choices of it, day or night. And of course online streams took that and multiplied it to an unlimited degree. But for a while there I was touched by the magic of radio that came to my little world from far-away cities I couldn't imagine ever visiting.

Radio's glory days were long before that, before and during World War II. In WLT, Keillor tells the story of a Minneapolis powerhouse radio station that decided to go ahead with all local talent instead of joining one of the networks. At the same time, you get the magic of radio that broke the isolation of the small towns and lonely farms, and the sordid reality of the all too human radio folk; the small-time businessmen and small-talent performers who had the foresight (or more often just the luck) to get into this new medium on the ground floor.

And at the other end, the people who didn't have the foresight to get off the ship when it started sinking, and who went down with it. Often the same people who rose to radio's glory days were the same ones who sank down into obscurity with it in the end. For all our talk of the Glory Days of Radio, this was a very short era in our history. Maybe fifteen years. It would have been even shorter if World War II hadn't stopped civilian projects like the introduction of television.

There is much about the glory days of radio, of how it felt to be there. There's also quite a lot about breasts. I get the feeling that Garrison Keillor has had to keep _A Prairie Home Companion_ clean and wholesome to the standard his fictional prairie Lutherans would approve. He's had to do it for decades, and the strain was too much for him. He's let fly a lifetime's worth of comments about titties, knockers, hooters, all in this one book.

I hope it made him feel better.

The book is a bit disjointed, especially in its early chapters. It started as a few short stories and this shows. But if you'd like a love letter to radio, either because you love it yourself or because you'd like to know about how it felt when the age of electronic information began, I think you'll enjoy this book.

[Jan Ackerson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm just not sure that the novel is Keillor's best form. This has his trademark quirky characters and settings, but after a couple of hundred pages, I got weary of all the quirkiness.

[Rrshively · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may have been a good book, but I couldn't get past the pubescent male humor of the first 2 chapters, so I quit reading it. I really loved Lake Woebegon Days, so was especially disaapointed with this book.

[Suzanna Strauss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book for obvious radio related reasons and there are some parts of the story that are interesting but overall I think, like some other reviewers have said, that the author clearly only views female characters as sexual beings which overshadows the parts of the story that are interesting. So sorry for that long sentence!!!!!

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 2 out of 5]

WLT: A Radio Romance by Garrison Keillor covers the maverick days of radio much as The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association by Loren D. Estleman does for the early days of filmmaking in Hollywood. With all his years in radio, Keillor excels at pointing out the oddities of running a small radio station and the dangers of competing against the big networks. WLT's history is believable even down to the detail that the call letters stand for "with lettuce and tomato."

Where WLT falters is in the telling of the romance. The romance is focused on Frank White, né Francis With and his long time love of WLT and how he builds his life and career at the station. He also falls in love with one of the less popular employees. Unfortunately Frank's story is buried under all the long tangential stories about WLT and the folks who work there and how the station affects the community and so forth.

Imagine if you will, a 7 hour Prairie Home Companion broadcast (normally the show runs 2 hours). That's how WLT reads. Even though I love listening to Keillor's broadcasts and love the film that was inspired by the radio show, WLT was too much of a good thing.

[Marikate Sears]

This book was written by a man that has never seen a woman for any other value besides sex.

[Abby T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've gotten sort of bored of this book - at least I did a year ago when I last put it down. I think I may give up on it soon, because the other option would be to start over from the beginning. I was about halfway through, and the idea of slogging through it all again just isn't attractive to me. Plus, I've since learned that Garrison Keillor is a rampant homophobe, which colors everything I read or hear in his voice with an off-putting hypocritical tinge.

[A Savatdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the start of it I wasn't sure I'd enjoy this book but found it to be great in the end. As someone who took broadcasting in school (what a waste, I know!) I have a love of radio. Francis With a.k.a. Frank White also fell in love with radio and his pursuit to succeed in the industry by people-pleasing makes me feel exactly how I was told to feel during my time I'm college. You will have to kiss ass to get anywhere. Or lie. And that is all I'm going to say about that.

[Love of Hopeless Causes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Opened like a refrigerator that makes perpetual farting sounds, but has nothing substantial inside.

[Kate]

Read too long ago to rate.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I was intrigued by the idea of reading a story about people working in the early days of radio, and given all the laughs I’ve had listening to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon stories over the years, I figured it might be fun. And Garrison doesn’t disappoint.

As with the Lake Woebegon stories, Garrison creates a universe of eccentric Minnesotans in “WLT”, as he tells the story of the beginning (and perhaps the end) of a radio station serving the Midwest in the days when radio became one of the first shared links between many people spread over a long distance. A radio station created by two brothers as a way to promote a restaurant takes on a life of its own, populated by a cast of performers, artists, and technicians who captivate their audience with a set of variety shows and radio plays (sound familiar, A Prairie Home Companion fans?). The employees of WLT become a sort of family, albeit a fairly dysfunctional one, and we see how one family of listeners in particular are affected by what they hear.

Garrison’s subtitle for the book, “A Radio Romance”, represents the odd dynamic between the people working at the radio station and the relationship between listeners and the station - a world where two groups that are and remain total strangers to each other develop a love and dependence on each other based on what they share.

Garrison gets a chance to create a semi-historical peek at life and love in the big city in the heady early days of radio, as opposed to the present -day slice of small-town life he presented to us on his radio show, as well as a love letter to the form of media that made him famous. Like life itself, the narrative may seem random and disjointed at times, and unlike the radio show monologues aren’t always that family-friendly, but it’s a fun read. Recommended!

[Art Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is yet another read from many years ago. I'm not sure when I first read WLT but it's been a couple of decades. I didn't remember a ton of it, but this time around there was some good and bad:

The atmosphere of early radio was fun, with that feeling of breaking new ground and feeling their way out. It must've been an exciting time. Francis/Frank was a great story to build things around, he embodied the innocence of early radio, the risk taking as time went on and then the jump to TV. Of course radio didn't die, but it's nothing like it used to be.

On the flip side the short character studies started to get really repetitive. Keillor likes to list a bunch of quirky show names and companies etc. and after a while you end up just skipping through them. The descriptions of the sex lives were kind of uncomfortable and smacked of voyeurism. It wasn't that long a book but it got tedious in the middle.

The definition of a three-star book. Somewhat enjoyable but not nearly enjoyable enough to read a second time...at least when you can still remember the first time.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this among my mother's books when cleaning out her house. She loved Keillor and I had time on my hands, so there you go. It read like his radio show, at times I could hear his voice in the narrations. The folksy way he charmed his audience. However, I found a lot of the material in this disturbing, especially given recent allegations of abuse in the #metoo movement. Initially, upon hearing the charges, I thought "well, this can't be", but having read the book and his treatment of the female characters by the male characters in the book, I'm not so sure.

The allegations are not the only reason I rated this a two star. I found it laborious in some spots and just too downright wordy in others. There were back stories I would just rather not have read. That said, there was something about sitting down and reading a book my mother cherished that made me feel a bit better. Two stars for Keillor, full heart for me.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember liking this as a teenager, but upon reading it again was a little underwhelmed. The men's appreciation of women feels skeevy, like the one dude whose arm brushed the side of his nurse's breast and he started fantasizing about her. I did like the writer at the end who was planning a murder to make his book sell, only to get hit by a car - but I wonder that, in this modern society, it's problematic to show someone being damaged to the point of limited mental capacity to be a kind of retribution. Or maybe I'm reading into something that isn't there.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a good story here, perhaps more than one, but it gets bogged down to me. Perhaps it is that there is more than one story like it feels like and Keillor never decides which he wants to tell. Perhaps it's more that I just didn't like the style and others would find it fine. I did enjoy much of it, but overall it felt like a bit of a slog. I like other Keillor better, but also some other Keillor worse. Oh well, whatever.

[Kimberly Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

#116

I kept hearing how funny Keillor is? To whom? Funny is: Carl Hiaasen, Jennifer Crusie, Christopher Moore, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich, et. al., not Keillor.

This was awful & boring: Brothers Ray & Roy own a restaurant which they partially convert into a radio Station, WLT. Ray, although married, is a womanizer. Roy is mostly an inventor & farmer. The book revolves around WLT, its owners, those who work there, & the programs.

300+ pages of boring...

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lake Wobegon it ain’t! Chronicles the rise and fall of radio station W L T and various characters connected therewith. Funny (sometimes bizarre), ribald and definitely not sweet. Is this Keillor’s reaction to people’s mistaking Lake Wobegon for reality or is it the way radio really is behind the scenes? It helps to read it with Keillor’s voice in your head.

[Russ Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first Garrison Keillor book I haven’t finished. The typical narrative lilt is there and there are moments of classic dry wit but the book gets going then descends into adolescent fantasy about women similar to how I was when I was 13.
Keillor is probably a master of imagining the minds of immature, one dimensional, men but it’s both boring and uncomfortable to read

[Austen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a kid who was #RaisedOnRadio, I was hoping that this would be classic Keillor mixed with a thread of radio station shenanigans from the very early days onwards, and wasn't disappointed. A bit rambling at times, but the feel of imagining his News From Lake Wobegon voice describing the antics of the characters as if coming through a crackly AM radio speaker made it very enjoyable.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and entertaining. Downsides were the frequent and unnecessary X-rated scenes and a randomly introduced character being followed by the narrative for the rest of the book, when the day-to-day happenings of the radio station seemed more effective in my opinion.

[Sally Andrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read, and I normally breeze through books. It was a good story about the early days of radio, but not mind-blowing or emotion-causing. I liked it ok. No backflips over it, but it wasn't bad.

[Woody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the historical aspects of this book about the prominence of radio in the early 1900s, and the type of programming they had back then. The tale took a sordid turn after that. There is an idea for a movie in this book though.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have been reading this book on and off for a year. Tough read, though interesting at times. This history of radio is an unusual one and the ending was odd, but felt like I learned a lot along the way.

[Katrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very entertaining read!

[Clive Bevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prefer the Lake Wobegon books.

[Barbara Lifland]

Gave up on page 84.

[Laurie E.Rice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.

[Darcie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to old Prairie Home Companion while reading this. Good combo.