Thanks Garrison

Used to be you could work on your car, take the engine apart and clean the armature, say, or put new bearings in. Any teenager could fiddle with an old V-8 engine, get dirty, learn how things worked and save a buck in the process. Now it’s all about computers: instead of fixing something, you just pull it out and replace it. In fact, that’s pretty much how the whole world works; as Clint Bunsen will tell you, life is faster and more complicated these days, and it costs more, but that doesn’t make it any better.

Bunsen owns the Ford garage in Lake Wobegon, Minn., the largely Lutheran town said to have been populated by homesteading immigrants from Norway, though actually it’s the creation of Garrison Keillor. In this novel, Keillor has a Melville-to-Ishmael relationship with his protagonist; at one moment it sounds as though Bunsen is doing the talking, and at others you seem to hear his creator’s low, rueful rumble, a sound that gladdens the hearts of the many who listen to Keillor’s weekly radio broadcasts.

On the surface, Keillor comes across as the patron saint of nostalgia in this country, but that isn’t quite right. He traffics mainly in two other emotions, one of which is resentment. If you’ve ever awakened at 3 a.m. to gnaw your liver and think how some stupid idiot has done some stupid thing that just made things stupider (and who hasn’t?), you can take comfort in the fact that in his home town, St. Paul, Garrison Keillor is probably doing exactly the same thing.

Or that between the pages of “Liberty,” Clint Bunsen is. As the chairman of Lake Wobegon’s Fourth of July festivities, Bunsen is a victim of his own success: last year’s show was such a fabulous celebration of small-town virtues that it rated a spot on CNN. But the residents of Lake Wobegon are a hateful and jealous tribe who resent Bunsen’s achievement, expect him to do it again but better this time, and gleefully anticipate his failure. And he knows it.

Yet as the pygmies of small-mindedness launch their tiny darts at the colossus who is Clint Bunsen, one thing keeps him upright, and that is the love of a bosomy redhead aptly named Angelica Pflame. Bunsen, who is married to somebody else, meets Angelica online and then in the flesh in a scene of astonishingly incandescent physicality; even godless readers will need to wear oven mitts while they’re taking in this passage, and Lutherans shouldn’t read it at all.

Garrison Keillor, erotic writer: who knew? But after resentment, desire is the other emotion Keillor handles with a master’s touch. Do not the two go together? Are Resentment and Desire not the twin steeds that yank us through the door every morning so we can score or settle scores or at least dream about those toothsome possibilities?

By the way, if you’re thinking that Bunsen wears Birkenstocks and starts his day with a bowl of muesli and The Utne Reader, you’re wrong. He’s useful to Keillor here precisely because, as opposed to the liberal author and radio personality, Bunsen is a die-hard Republican who thinks there’s “a lot of meanness which is programmed into us and can’t be wished away.” The better to resent you with, my dear.

But especially in the paragraphs where Bunsen laments the loss of small-town weirdness, you hear the creator more than the creation. Keillor’s is one of the great voices of our time, like that of ­Homer Simpson or George W. Bush. As such, it’s familiar to the millions of Americans who have heard it on his radio shows: “A Prairie Home Companion,” which features “The News From Lake Wobegon,” every Saturday afternoon, and the daily “Writer’s Almanac,” which is devoted to poetry and literary history.

Like Mark Twain, Keillor takes time to spell out details and, in so doing, convert the base metal of small-town tedium to the gold of comedy. If, in one of his radio broadcasts, he’s telling you how somebody is going to put his grandmother’s ashes into Lake Wobegon, for example, he’ll describe how the mourner is going to pack them into a bowling ball first and drop it into the water while parasailing, only his swim trunks are going to slip down in the process so he’ll end up flying over the lake naked.

On that lake, there’ll be a barge with a capacity of 18 passengers, though somehow 24 managed to board, so now that barge is slowly sinking. The 24 passengers will be Lutheran clergymen on an outing, and they’ll weigh a little bit more than usual because they’ve just enjoyed a copious buffet luncheon. There’ll also be an old, bad-smelling dog.

Now if you find this scenario funny, you’re likely to find it a lot funnier if you hear Keillor’s voice describing it. Everyone knows that it’s not the joke that counts so much as how it is told, when, where and to whom, though none of these are as important as who does the telling. In the mind’s eye, the doings in “Liberty” are mildly amusing; in the mind’s ear, they’re hilarious.

Storywise, “Liberty” doesn’t dazzle, nor is it intended to. As in most leading-up-to-the-event novels, the action moves in just one direction (an author can do only so much with flashbacks), and convention requires that there be lots of complications but that things turn out O.K. in the end, which is what happens. “Liberty” excels at portraiture, not plot. Clint Bunsen, c’est vous, reader, et moi aussi.

But what’s with Viking releasing a Fourth of July novel in the fall? Production delays occur all the time, but couldn’t the press have waited till next summer?

Or maybe it knew what it was doing, after all. Writers are a thin-skinned lot and prone to see conspiracy at every hand; I wonder if by throwing Keillor yet another bone of resentment to chew on, perhaps Viking is doing everything in its power to keep him happy. Long may he sulk, the press may be thinking, and long dream up redheaded temptresses as well as the grumpy guys who love them.

David Kirby is editing, with Barbara Hamby, “Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else.”