Garrison Keillor has his hands full at the moment. He has a new book out and, at 55, he has a nearly-new daughter as well. So his latest creation - the one just published by Faber & Faber, that is - is competing for his time with two-month-old Maia, who along with her mother has travelled with him on the current reading tour.
And so far, it's no contest. In a London hotel this week, the book was coming a poor second and evidence of the other baby was everywhere: disposable nappies, a recently vacated cot, a father adjusting to new sleeping hours: "I think she's on Australian time." Not that Keillor is new to fatherhood, but his "experimental first child," is now 28 and the technology has moved on a bit.
It's funny he should mention Australia, because an interview with Minnesota's most famous author is a bit like a phonecall to Sydney. There are disconcerting delays after you ask questions and, when there are pauses in the conversation, it's hard to time your interruptions properly.
There are a lot of pauses in Keillor's conversation and, in apparent keeping with the Lake Wobegon philosophy that you shouldn't draw attention to yourself, none of these are in any way pregnant or dramatic. So it's easy to mistake verbal commas for full stops and then, just when you think it's safe to cross the track, the author's train of thought pulls off again.
Keillor has made a career writing about God's Frozen People -the Scandinavian settlers of the American midwest - and his teeming cast of characters are united only by Lutheranism and a distrust of extravagance in any form. Polite and urbane though he is, it's tempting to see the writer himself as the quintessential Wobegoner. "We're famous for being distrustful of strangers and for remaining leery against outsiders," he explains at one point, with what might be a leery look.
To say he doesn't become animated in conversation (except on the subject of his rift with the New Yorker, and we're talking small measures even there) would be an understatement. The man is as laid-back as you can be and still have a pulse, and any other clues to what's going on in his head are scarce. In his readings, which are more like one-man shows, he apologises for a tendency to stand side-on to the audience, explaining that Lake Wobegoners find eye contact painful. Whether or not this is true in his case, he certainly rations it in interviews.
But it's a mistake to assume too close a relationship between his fact and fiction. For example, many fans of his comic world of Olsens and Bunsens and the Sons of Knute might be shocked to learn that there isn't a Norwegian bone in the author's body. His paternal ancestors came from Yorkshire in the 18th century; and his maternal grandfather left Scotland in this one, for reasons Keillor doesn't understand.
"I don't know why he came. He was comfortably off in Scotland, and I've always wondered if it wasn't ill-feeling with other members of the family. A lot of people came to America for vaguely high moral reasons, when the real reason was because they couldn't get on with their relatives. So they became part of this bad-tempered nation instead."
It turns out that keeping on the right side of his own relatives is one of the reasons his characters are Norwegian. "Well, firstly, you have to remember that the books grew out of the radio show, which was originally a local show in Minnesota. Norwegians are the predominant group there, and I wanted to use negotiable currency - characters that were instantly identifiable.
"But also it helps disguise the tracks and, you know, protect the innocent." He lapses into one of those pauses. "It's a dodgy business telling stories about real life and real people, as most of mine are." On the face of it, the latest novel - Wobegon Boy - seems like a case in point. The story of John Tollefson, a radio manager mired in a mid-life crisis and finding love, looks plausibly autobiographical. Especially so its central event: the death of the Tollefson's father, which crystalises the character's feelings both about love and about the lack of grandeur and nobility in his own life, compared with the struggles of the ancestors who set up home in America.
The father's funeral takes up 80 pages in a 300-page novel and though very funny in parts, the passage is also sad and tender. It is a little surprising, therefore, to find that Keillor's real father is very much alive. Moreover the author - just a small bit shamefaced, you sense - even disowns the mid-life crisis: "I seem to have skipped having one".
He has little to add to this: the characters are fictional; he's a fiction writer; he makes things up. And when read by him to a live audience, the funeral gets more belly laughs than you expect it to from reading it yourself.
Some of this is down to the author's stage manner. A big man with a pugnose and a slightly wild hair-style, he looks very much the part of the literary humorist. A dapper suit and bow-tie vie with a slightly shambling walk, and a tendency to wear bright red socks helps ensure nothing he says is taken too seriously. But the key thing is his delivery - slow and deadpan, but as polished as new shoes. It's surprising how well the material works in oral form. Keillor-the-writer's humour is as quiet as he is, and is often at its funniest describing the crippling self-consciousness of his fellow midwesterners. In the new book he tells how his town's marching band "played with a lurching rhythm - the result of 40 musicians waiting to hear the beat before they play it".
And in Lake Wobegon Days, he describes the plight of a lapsed Lutheran who writes his own "95 theses" in a dramatic complaint about what a strict upbringing has done to him. Intending to nail them to the door of the Lutheran church, he finds that something in that upbringing makes him afraid "to pound holes in a good piece of wood," so he posts them to the local newspaper instead.
But unlike many writers who can do it on the page, Keillor is a master at delivering his own lines, and not without reason. Though he describes live radio as a "lost cause", his weekly Prairie Home Companion, for which he is still best-known to many in the US, has been an American institution since 1974. A live, two-hour mix of stories, comedy sketches, songs and guest appearances, it attracts a listenership of about three million across the US, surviving largely on the donations of fans. The programme goes out 34 weeks in the season and Keillor still writes all of it, spending Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday mornings on the task; while his "experimental first child," Jason, is one of the many involved in the broadcast.
But if radio remains a big part of his life, another early love seems to have gone for good. Since parting company with the New Yorker five years ago, Keillor has lost interest in writing the shorter stories and essays which made his reputation and which, thanks to the likes of Perelman and Thurber, are the heart of the American humour writing tradition.
"The New Yorker used to be a writers' magazine and it was very important to me. But under Tina Brown's editorship, it's been transformed into a magazine which is driven by gossip. It's not a writer's magazine any more - it's all about `buzz' now. "Now that Madonna has a new album out, for example, Tina Brown needs somebody to write about Madonna, even if Madonna is as I believe a completely self-created and uninteresting phenomenon. In February, it was Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Tina really, really needed somebody to write about Bill and Monica. I can't imagine a topic I would find less interesting to write about than Bill and Monica. But that's where the buzz is and the beast has got to be fed." He still loves short stories and thinks there are "magnificent" things being done in the form. "But the New Yorker was my outlet for that and, besides, nobody wants to buy collections of stories. It's an odd fact but it's true. And I kind-of like the idea of being read."
The move to the novel is a profound career-change for Keillor, and still a tentative one. Wobegon Boy is only his second attempt at the discipline, and this from a man who's on his third attempt at marriage. The great body of his published work has been based on the short story, albeit in sometimes disguised form, as in the epic Lake Wobegon Days.
Fans of that book may recall the poignant preface, in which the author tells how he literally lost a story back in 1974 when he left his briefcase behind him in the men's room of a Portland railway station. He never found it and was haunted for long afterwards by the real or imagined brilliance of the piece.
Twenty four years on, he can still feel the pain. "I searched in trash cans for blocks and blocks around the train station. It was a desperate feeling, and because of the hysteria and grief of losing it I found I could never rewrite it. It was gone, completely. I've lost things since - I lost part of this novel through one of those block-headed things like not saving it. But I find now I can go outside and take a deep breath and go back and rewrite it, and it may even be better."
The new novel shows that he hasn't quite kicked his old habits. The book is full of digressions and the basic plot often seems like a thin excuse for telling more funny yarns about Norwegians. But there is at least one serious argument lurking within the plot and that is the lack of a great purpose - "magnificence" is his word for it - in contemporary America.
"I think my generation is guilty of a monumental lack of magnificence, yes. One feels it especially reading about the generation who fought World War II and then came home and transformed the country in the 1950s. I don't think my generation has transformed anything. It has turned against public projects of any kind and it has turned away from government, which I believe is capable of doing great things."
He doesn't accept for a moment that good times kill creativity: "I think great art is much more the product of peace and economic prosperity than of poverty and violence". He mentions the "great things" James Joyce was able to do living in the 1920s and 1930s living in Trieste and Zurich, "surrounded by bankers".
Poor writers do better when they're surrounded by prosperity, so that "enough crumbs fall off the table" to support them. "There was enough prosperity around Joyce that he was able to raise children and support his family and still do what he had to do."
Another serious idea in the novel is a dislike for the culture of victimhood which is rampant in modern-day America. His main character falls foul of an office secretary who is a member of a "Wounded Daughters of Distant Fathers" support group and doesn't appreciate Tollefson's sense of humour.
Keillor plays down the theme: "The very thing my character dislikes I rather enjoy, if only as a place where one gets material for satire." But he adds: "The secretary is one of those people who find therapeutic value in ascribing their problems to the emotional unresponsiveness of their parents. Well, you know, we all feel that about our parents at some time or another. My daughter is two months old and I'm sure she probably feels her father is emotionally unresponsive." If he's not proud of his generation, though, Keillor remains very proud of his profession. "I think writing is maybe the hardest work there is and I believe writers are some of the last of the true entrepreneurs." Among humorists who make him laugh, he mentions Ian Frazier and Roy Blount. And pressed on the subject of a writer with whom he is sometimes compared, he concedes Mark Twain is "still funny, 100 years on, which is a great feat".
But it's not a feat he cares to emulate, and his new priorities surface again. "Posterity is not something I find interesting to think about. I'd be very happy just to think my books will continue to support my daughter, if anything were to happen to me."
Garrison Keillor reads from his novel Wobegon Boy, with a medley of songs and questions about America, tomorrow, at the Gate Theatre, 8 p.m.