Tom Bodett’s `Big Garage’ a winner

THE BIG GARAGE ON CLEAR SHOT, by Tom Bodett, Morrow, 300 pages, $18.95.

Yes, Tom Bodett — the voice of those catchy Motel 6 radio ads (“We’ll leave the light on for you”) — is just as old-shoe as a writer as he is as a talker on his syndicated National Public Radio show “The End of The Road.”

If you liked Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota you’ll love Tom Bodett’s Alaska. End of the Road is the setting for this book, Bodett’s fourth. As he informed us in an earlier book, End of the Road gets more than its fair share of novel individuals.

“It’s always been that way,” Bodett writes. “From Argus Winslow to Doug McDoogan, this place has for years served as refuge to those characters who never found what suited them farther up the road. The End of the Road might be sort of the grease trap of America that way …”

Bodett, who well may be the most famous resident of Homer, Alaska, named his latest book for the local landmark where all of his characters get together to swap lies — or did, before the mayor’s sister opened up Clara’s Coffee Cup. Now the whole gang has moved from the big garage to the town’s newest gossip shop. But they are just as ornery as ever, thank God.

Junkyard tycoon Winslow is chumming professional spinster Ruby McClay and the two are turning into regular lovebirds; vegetarian activist Tamara Dupree is raising all kinds of hell — the more so since the Exxon Valdez ran aground and fouled the environment; and displaced bureaucrat Emmit Frank discovers that Alaska ain’t no Chicago, but it sure is good for the soul — especially when one is working one’s favorite fishing hole 20 miles into the outback.

Those characters — and others such as Runover Joe and that big old lovable galoot, Ed Flannigan, the rock-solid citizen who drives the town grader — drift in and out of the narrative with impeccable timing.

Just when you get all interested in the romantic endeavors of Argus and Ruby, Bodett switches gears. Flannigan loses his arm in a work-related accident on what was supposed to have been his day off; McDoogan, habitual liar and driftwood carver who has been “discovered” by a wealthy patron, gets caught in one of his convoluted fabrications; teen-ager Norman Tuttle gets over his extreme shyness and asks the light of his life out on a chaperoned date. Young love blossoms under the northern sun.

Practically the whole town shows up to help Stormy and Kirsten Storbock frame their new home: “Everybody appeared to have brought two kids and at least one dog each, all of whom blended into a gyrating vortex of Frisbees, dirt clods, broken hearts and bicycles.”

Not that the Storbocks really wanted all of that free, but enthusiastic, help, seeing as how their new digs now tend to tilt a bit toward Sawyer’s. Not to worry, Kirsten reassures her husband after the day’s work has concluded and the couple stands admiring the end product, “It would have taken your hired men two or three days to do all of this.”

“You’re right,” replies Stormy. “And it’ll probably only take them a week to fix it.”

These are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, no doubt about it. But that is precisely what makes their transformation into pretty special characters in the hands of this skilled storyteller so fascinating.

Kent Ward is the NEWS associate managing editor.