Garrison Keillor, Love Me

Garrison Keillor isn’t Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon. Love Me won’t be a Pulitzer finalist, and the prose isn’t the sort of muscular writing that wins an author rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review .

With that disclaimer out of the way, Keillor’s latest novel is utterly charming. It tells the story of a relationship over a lifetime, carrying the reader along from the first date (at a choir concert) through decades of separation and infidelity and onward to the realization, acknowledged from the start of the book, that the narrator’s place is in St. Paul with his wife, not hobnobbing in New York or gallivanting in Holland with a more stylish woman.

Seeing that from the start would make for a more satisfying life, but it wouldn’t be much of a book. Instead, Love Me has plot twists to spare. Larry Wyler—narrator and thinly-veiled Keillor stand-in—slogs along as an unpublished writer, suddenly achieves bestsellerdom and fame, works at the New Yorker , rubbing shoulders with Updike and Salinger, releases a flop, and becomes Mr. Blue, an advice columnist. In a bizarre plot twist that offers a revealing sample of the novel’s overall mood, Wyler discovers that the New Yorker —the magazine he has worshipped all his life—is a vehicle for the mob, and he is called on by the staff to kill the publisher, who plans to merge the magazine with Field and Stream .

The writing, for most of the book, is suitable for such a plot, playful and inviting, and it carries the reader along. As Wyler ages, the prose changes; the novel’s conclusion is written tenderly, a reflection of the narrator’s softening and newfound wisdom as time goes by, and the result is a tone fitting for those who imagine Keillor’s famous voice as they read his work. The shift makes the final fifth of the book the best part of it; as Wyler works to fix his marriage the new kindness he lavishes on his long-neglected wife is reflected onto the reader as well.

An added bonus for this reader was Keillor’s apparent love, though jaded, for his home in Minnesota. Scenes relaxing at the cabin up north, roaming the State Fair, and simply existing around St. Paul and Minneapolis are perfectly rendered to inspire a bout of Minnesota nostalgia.

Keillor has also let his bitterness about the current political situation seep through: Bush’s ascendance in 2000 is an important event near the end of the book, and St. Paul’s mayor, clearly meant to be now-Senator Norm Coleman, comes in for some harsh treatment. But this is a minor distraction from a delightful, if admittedly also minor, novel.

A Book-Lover's Book

Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

This interesting little memoir was given to me by Chris and Jane Wilson when I left Minneapolis in June, and it has served me very well this week. Paul Collins is a humorous writer who knows how to keep the laughs understated. Odd bits of trivia pop up every page or two as Collins and family move to the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye--the town of books. With 1,500 people, Hay-on-Wye has 40 bookstores and seems like just the place for Collins and his also-an-author wife to raise their new son. So they leave San Francisco and its high rents and fast-paced life behind, and soon they're trying to buy a house in Hay-on-Wye, only to find that every house for sale is either a new-built cookie-cutter or requires complete gutting because it's over 400 years old.

All of this sounds banal, but it isn't--in the hands of Collins it's a happy little tale that you can't help but enjoy. The author's struggles to conjure up a title for his first book, about notable failures, coincide with working in a burned-out castle where ancient books arrive in cargo containers and are sorted and resorted for no apparent purpose, and this dovetails with Collins' ill-formed notion that he can become a member of the House of Lords. (The book, by the way, ends up being called Banvard's Folly : Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World , and if you ever see it at a used bookstore, I'll pay you to buy it for me.)

None of this description does this book justice. It's the kind of book that you can read before bed; you won't kill yourself trying to finish it, because it breaks up nicely, and you'll fall asleep content and at peace.

Collins works with Dave Eggers, he of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius fame, so I'm sure we'll hear more from him in the future. For now, pick up Sixpence House if you see it. You won't regret it.