Garrison Keillor scarcely needs my approval. The success of his Lake Wobegon books, recordings, readings and performances over the last decade or so must have made him a millionaire several times over. But there are very good reasons for recommending to storytellers unfamiliar with them a very thorough listening to some of his cassettes. Because Keillor is not only a good writer, performer and broadcaster; he's a bloody good storyteller too.

Now as I write that I can sense not a few hackles rising. Keillor's homely anecdotal tales of life in an imaginary mid-Western town seem a far cry from the kind of recasting of traditional story and myth that absorbs most revival storytellers in Britain. Besides which, he writes down and publishes his tales in written form. On some of his cassettes he's clearly reading from the manuscript, which is how I first heard him in the various series he did for BBC Radio 4. It's clever, witty and droll writing, skilfully delivered in Keillor's attractive, slow, deep Minnesota burr, but not much to do with oral storytelling.

Well, that's what I used to think. It was something I found enjoyable but I didn't make the connection with the kind of storytelling I do until I happened to buy the two double cassettes 'News from Lake Wobegon - Spring-Summer' and 'Fall-Winter' in the BBC Radio Collection, and then another (excellent value) 4-cassette set 'Lake Wobegon U.S.A.' (Hodder Headline Audio Books). Listening to those, in all of which Keillor is working with live audiences for simultaneous broadcast on American radio, taught me so much about timing, about space in a narrative, about relating to experience, about using the voice and using silence, that it would be hard to explain. Keillor certainly seems to improvise around the tales, plays up a strand in a story you've heard him tell from a script or read in one of his books and produces a new emphasis, above all makes his relationship with what sound as though they are huge theatre audiences central, managing to give the impression that he's chatting in a back room to a few friends. It's all done with an impeccable microphone technique, something well worth studying for those occasions when you just have to use one.

And the narratives themselves? Well, they are a far cry from what I've heard of the rather self-indulgent and self-conscious personal tales many professional American storytellers seem to go in for. There's always more than a hint of wry self-mockery in Keillor's storytelling and a complicated, almost post-modern, game of fiction-making you don't spot to begin with. What seem on the surface to be mere lightweight ramblings in which nothing much happens ("It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon" is Keillor's trademark opening) turn out to be beautifully crafted arabesques where several themes are often tied together with a final stroke. There's a story in the 'Lake Wobegon U.S.A.' set which illustrates this perfectly: it begins with an apparently pointless anecdote about a man who ate mushrooms which had come up on his family grave, much to the horror of his neighbours. After a long detour Keillor 'reaps' that image at the end of his yarn with a wry final line, the gist of which is that, if the point of a life has been to 'become good mushrooms', it's not a bad idea to get on and appreciate them.

Or, if you want controversy, look at the way Keillor, a lifelong liberal, manages gently and subtly to criticise America around the time of the Gulf War, and question some of its small-town values on that same cassette. It's a trick managed more or less covertly with an engaging story about why he prefers to be a likeable liar out for his own interests rather than a prophet who saw 'snow in July'.

And Keillor has a real feel for ordinary people in a rural community, knows about their lives and the way they live them in a way that, you suspect, many people inclined to telling traditional tales of ordinary folk don't. He doesn't generally sentimentalise (though you'd have to say he has a sentimental streak) neither does he patronise in the way I've heard even major tellers in this country do when talking about, say, shepherds or fishermen or farmers who happen to be central figures in a tale and whose actual lives the tellers clearly have not the faintest idea about. It's good to hear stories of life told by someone who seems to have actually experienced it.

Keillor is not without his faults. There are times when he seems almost to be parodying himself, times when he becomes a little too arch and knowing. His stories don't have the underlying 'weight' a traditional tale can gather, though there's often a kindred hint of metaphor here and there, not to mention the occasional motif with roots in tradition. And I have to say that I know one or two people who just can't stand him, who really don't 'get it'. Clearly I can and do and reckon it's well worth giving him a go.

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