Well, Guest, you are quite right that many people do take fiction to heart in that way, and when it gets coupled with celebrity and notoriety it can be absolutely exasperating. James Dickey is a good writer, but his son begged him to exclude a notorious scene from the film of his book Deliverance, on the ground that it would be all anyone talked about.... Jokes and even serious notions about inbred hillbillies are everywhere, as though there were time in a 200 year old country to outpace a royal family in that department. Truth is simply that mountain people didn't institutionalise their developmentally challenged family members.

   Somewhere in this country some schoolmaster fostered a notion that fiction should be simple and sincere, but it gets very complicated to be sincere when you represent real places and groups of people out of the play-dough in your own head. I think you have a point, I do see it now, but it's an aggravation that can't be cured. Nothing wrong with expressing it, since that's all that can be done. Nobody is above criticism. But it may be the audience's fault more than the artist's. And I'd suspect Keillor's craft evolved to a degree in a collaboration with his audience, the way a performer feels that strange dynamic, of what will work. Keillor might be taken too seriously, might sometimes take himself too seriously, we might all take ourselves too seriously.

I liked Fargo, very much, but the crawl about the "true story" and names changed out of "respect" for the survivors bothered me from the start. And I was wrong, it ends back in Brainerd, not in N. Dakota.