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“... facing the real challenges of a writer’s life: alcohol and alimony. So it was a relief that Garrison Keillor should have left the Midwest and come to rest in the bosom of the New Yorker. Once installed there, he could safely be identified as ‘the new Thurber’, well-placed to cast an ironic, distanced eye upon the mores of his fellow ...”

“... to be the last of the funhouse novels I doubt if anyone would complain very much. Edmund White, Garrison Keillor and Bobbie Ann Mason belong to the generation of American writers born during the Second World War. White’s Caracole is set in an imaginary country, part European and part Third World, in the midst of a pre-industrial Belle Epoque. The ...”

“... from prose only by the use of rhyme. Unsurprisingly, examples of pure verse are hard to find. Garrison Keillor’s ‘Mrs Sullivan’, however, is the perfect instance, das Ding an sich: its message is wryly feminist and its medium, when Keillor reads it on radio, is the purest prose anecdote because the enjambment ...”

“... remained Hepburn. Sumus quod sumus was the motto of the citizens of Lake Wobegon, according to Garrison Keillor. Perhaps they got it from Shakespeare’s sonnet. At any rate, when the play of Jane Eyre opened in New Haven on 26 December 1936, in a stage version by Helen Jerome, the critics wondered ‘if it is not easier to see Katharine Hepburn in ...”

“... his fancy. If the result isn’t quite the ‘brilliant, funny and altogether perfect book’ that Garrison Keillor lauds on the front cover, nevertheless at least half the time it is very good. When it sags it is because Frazier has succumbed to too much geography and potted history, to interminable and arid résumés of the careers of celebrated Indians ...”

“... way of life, with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque ...”