During the bleakest days of World War II, a brilliant young American writer named Nathanael West published a daring novel called Miss Lonelyhearts, in which a problem-ridden advice columnist for a daily newspaper is unable to help either himself or the tormented people who seek his assistance. Now, nearly three-quarters of a century later, the popular humorist and storyteller Garrison Keillor has written a novel in some ways reminiscent of West’s masterpiece. There’s one important difference, however.
Love Me, the latest work of fiction by the host of the public radio show “A Prairie Home Companion,” is a hilarious satire of just about everything in the early 21st century worth poking fun at, from the writing life to the president of the United States.
Love Me opens in St. Paul, Minn., where its narrator, Larry Wyler, is struggling to establish himself as a fiction writer. One of the reliable pleasures of Keillor’s writing is its clear-eyed evocation of the American heartland. Here he is on the contrasts between uptown and downtown St. Paul: “Down here are the mechanics and millhands, the laundry workers, the ladies of the cafeterias.
Up there the grocery sells goat yoghurt and eight different kinds of oregano and coffee beans from Costa Rica and in the coffee shops you hear Haydn and people talking about Henry James. Down here people season their food with salt and the coffee comes in cans and in the coffee shops people talk about their sister whose husband beat the ‘expletive’ out of her and took off for South Dakota.”
“Please, dear Lord, do not let me die a local writer,” Larry Wyler prays after toiling five years to publish three stories in obscure regional journals. His dream of success seems to come true when he publishes a steamy bestseller called Spacious Skies. Soon afterward, he lights out for New York in order “to be in the midst of things, not out on the fringe.”
His wife, Iris, a down-to-earth social worker and vigorous advocate for the elderly, thinks he has gone off the deep end. “So maybe you better go to New York and get it out of your system and if you want to come back and be married again, then we’ll see,” she tells him. “I hope you know I love you.”
Initially, Larry is entranced by New York. He makes the talk-show rounds, writes a second, very bad novel that bombs, has a brief relationship with a silly, strawberry-blond psychiatrist and a fling with an even sillier fact checker, and goes to work for the New Yorker magazine. Trouble is, Larry is desperately homesick and entirely out of place in the Big Apple.
Next, writer’s block sets in, and here Keillor is at his sidesplitting funniest, lampooning all writers everywhere, including himself. Unable to write so much as a single decent paragraph, Larry sits down and compiles a list of answers to the question “Why do I write?” “Am otherwise unemployable,” he acknowledges, adding, moreover, that he hopes to please his old English teacher and impress women. (“The desire to become a writer has very modest origins,” Keillor told an interviewer several years ago. “You are trying to make some English teachers happy, and maybe impress two or three girls in the bargain.”)
Love Me proceeds to do for — or to — contemporary American literary life what Kingsley Amis’s uproarious academic spoof, Lucky Jim, did to British universities several decades ago. Piety of all kinds is Keillor’s target. Like his Midwestern literary predecessor Mark Twain, he despises whatever is sanctimonious, self-righteous and disingenuous, going after every taboo he can find, with a gleeful but never ill-natured abandon. Since his first Lake Wobegon novels, chronicling the adventures of John Tollefson, Keillor has never for a minute lost sight of the primary objective of all fiction. It may instruct or inspire us, but it must always, on some level, entertain us. In its no-holds-barred assaults on all kinds of contemporary sanctities, from psychotherapy to radio talk shows, Love Me is unfailingly engaging.
Keillor has the great gift of making just about any situation funny by celebrating the very human foibles he is skewering. Still, by the time Wyler confronts the Mafioso publishing don in the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, I was ready to return to Keillor’s smart and sensible Minnesotans, who know “how to set the timing on a Ford V-8” and “how the big grain elevators were built without interior or exterior bracing.”
- Arab News Features 28 August 2003