“Pray for me in return,” implores Larry Wyler, prodigal Minnesotan, lapsed author, celebrated advice columnist and aging narrator of Garrison Keillor’s most recent novel, Love Me. He’s preparing to confess his life, remarking on his drab St. Paul neighborhood and sketching passers-by in hypothetical missives to Mr. Blue, his writerly Dear Abby persona. He spots a shabby young hipster, accompanied icily by his girlfriend, who he dubs “Confused” and in whom he sees a wracking choice between relationship and rebellion. Wyler, in his Mr. Blue voice, urges freedom—”Hey, it’s only life son. It can crowd in on a guy fast”—and silently informs the man that he’s saying “a prayer for you now as you walk past me” before Wyler makes his reciprocal plea.
Keillor did a real-life stint as a celebrity writer-turned-advice columnist—also under the name Mr. Blue—for Salon.com, submitting his final column in September 2001, shortly after he underwent major heart surgery. Among other improvements he made on the form, “Mr. Blue” featured free-form introductions by Keillor—he might meditate on circumstances and events in his own life that framed Keillor’s or Mr. Blue’s forthcoming views on correspondents’ traumas and dilemmas—and responses that weren’t limited by the tight column-inches constraint that prevails over print counterparts. He chose the name Mr. Blue, Keillor told Salon in a subsequent interview, “to suggest that I had been around the block and gotten knocked down a few times and had a healthy sense of melancholy.”
But if Keillor’s position as an authorial seigneur of angst and tribulation has accumulated over decades of personal experience, his various work—in 40-plus years in broadcasting and more than 10 books, as humorist and breadbasket mythologist and flinty political satirist—has always been pervaded by pronounced warmth and reflexive empathy with his audience. With Keillor, writerly introspection has been deployed in such a way that he and his audience are carried forward toward the same ends. Keillor, who visited Charlottesville last November for a broadcast of his public radio variety show “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Charlottesville Performing Arts Center, will return on March 24 as a headlining speaker at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
As with much of his work, Love Me, which was published last summer by Viking Press, stokes fervent curiosity about where reality leaves off and fiction begins. In addition to their parallel tenures as Mr. Blue, both Keillor and Wyler were born in 1942. Both married women they met while students at the University of Minnesota. Both scored early success with short, humorous stories published in The New Yorker, later becoming staff writers for the magazine and achieving considerable celebrity. Both had heated romances with Danish women (a second wife, in Keillor’s case).
Of course, the demarcation between fact and fiction is elsewhere bluntly evident, as these basic points of intersection give rise to a signature Keillor farce and provide a framework for absurd digressions. At Wyler’s New Yorker, J.D. Salinger is reimagined as an annoying colleague who attempts to lure other writers into co-authoring dead-end projects (like a “Holden Caulfield cookbook”). The New Yorker is secretly controlled by a Mafia chieftain who ultimately concludes the magazine needs more stories “in which people fish and hunt and get laid,” and so devises to merge it with another acquisition, Field and Stream. He’ll form a new title to be called The New Yonder, “about hunting and fishing but in the larger sense.”
And Wyler steams ahead on the rails of reasonable literary ambition in a way Keillor never did. In the introduction to 1982’s Happy To Be Here, Keillor’s first book, which collected stories originally published in The New Yorker, Keillor described how he abandoned an effort to write a sprawling work about “God or the American people.” In fact, he said, the stories in that anthology were written “in revolt against a book” and in admiration of the idea of “three pages sharp and funny” and New Yorker exemplars of the form, James Thurber, A.J. Leibling, S.J. Perelman and E.B White.
Wyler attempts and fails the “Great Midwestern Novel” too, but instead turns to a manual called How To Write Your Novel in Thirty Days and produces a pulpish best seller, Spacious Skies. His job at The New Yorker follows, then a flop of a sequel (Amber Waves of Grain), and decades of devastating writer’s block and archetypal dissolution (drinking, womanizing) under a comically indulgent editorial regime at the magazine.
There is redemption for Wyler, though. He finds purpose, and the self-respect of a man earning his living, in his Mr. Blue column. Cornered and urged by his fellow staff writers, Wyler shoots and kills The New Yorker’s Mafioso publisher in the famed Oak Room of Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, a volley in defense of the magazine’s purchase on the heights of American letters. And, finally, he reconciles with his wife and first love, a saintly altruist and sturdy Democrat, in St. Paul.
So, with the addition of yet another novel to his already extensive oeuvre, Keillor continues to eschew the “big” book and instead carries forward a “revolt against piety,” a phrase he used to describe an earlier work, Wobegon Boy, to the Atlantic Monthly in a 1997 interview. The hyperbolic absurdity of the overhaul contemplated for The New Yorker by its publisher in Love Me and Wyler’s guerilla role in opposing it say something genuine and passionate about Keillor’s view of the magazine. (Keillor left The New Yorker in 1992 when Tina Brown became its editor, and was unreserved in expressing his distaste for her prior work at Vanity Fair.) But the solemnity and awe with which the magazine is often treated is itself sent up by the overarching flippancy of Keillor’s mock memoir.
In the main, the book is offered as an “entertainment,” Keillor has said, and its satirical elements are characteristically gentle. Favoring scattershot zaniness over unmasked hypocrisy, he takes on quotidian foibles and life’s more mild distresses and disarms them. By and large, Love Me is too fanciful to be cutting and the targets too small to alarm.
In a 1995 Paris Review interview conducted by the late George Plimpton, Plimpton offered the admiring view that Keillor was exceptionally gifted with a sense for detail. Keillor denied it vigorously. “I don’t have much equipment at all. I have a very poor sense of smell. I leave blanks in all my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.”
Plimpton pressed on, noting a Keillor story he’d read recently that involved “automatic milking systems,” suggesting that Keillor must have relied on “a lot of catalogues.”
“No. The Lake Wobegon stories are remarkably empty of detail. They are like 20-minute haikuThis is what permits people who grew up in Sandusky, Ohio, or Honolulu, Hawaii, or people who grew up in Staten Island for God’s sake, to imagine that I’m talking about their hometown,” Keillor insisted.
Keillor invented Lake Wobegon, a fictional central Minnesota town, to serve a similar purpose for him personally. The town acts as the setting for the quirky, homespun, episodic monologues that became the hallmark of his remarkably successful 25-year career as the host of “A Prairie Home Companion.”
Living on a farmhouse in rural Freeport, Minnesota, with his new wife and young child in the early ‘70s, making his cheap rent by selling stories to The New Yorker and working as an announcer for a local radio station, Keillor experienced a deep sense of isolation amid the native townsfolk, he wrote in National Geographic about three years ago. Despite his conventional grooming and behavior, and yearning for a “town with a bar, in which, if a stranger enters, he is, by God, without fail, intriguing to the regulars,” Keillor encountered an automatic suspicion of outsiders. He later identified the attitude as an abiding counter-reaction by the ethnic-German population against cultural persecution during World War I.
So, desperate to be invited into the inner life of his new community, the neighborly klatches at its restaurants and bars, but “having no idea how to traverse those 15 feet without feeling like a beggar,” Keillor returned “home to his typewriter and invent[ed] characters who look like the guys in the bar but who talk a blue streak, whose inner life he is privy to, and soon he has replaced the entire town of Freeport with an invented town of which he is the mayor, the fire chief, the priest, the physician, and the Creator himself.”
Keillor said he accepted the reserve of his Freeport neighbors because he was of similar stock, having grown up outside Minneapolis in a working class family of fundamentalist Protestants—members of a small sect called the Plymouth Brethren—”who could sit in silence for long stretches and not feel uncomfortable.” And if Keillor’s fiction and broadcasts—down to the narcoleptic cadences of his delivery—gave audiences a canvas they could decorate with their own reminiscences and reflections, its boundaries were still clearly informed by a sentimental affection for America’s small town communities and admiration for the hardscrabble virtues of his Minnesotan milieu.
Despite his childhood creed’s xenophobic tendencies, Keillor had exhibited an early interest in high culture and the writing life. And, paradoxically, Keillor has located the kernel of this affinity in his family. “What smote me with a desire for grandeur did not, of course, come out of thin air—it came from various relatives and from school teachers who possessed a certain grandeur themselves. One of my grandfathers enjoyed Milton, another could recite Burns. My father knew acres of Longfellow by heart, and he was a very grand poet. You hear ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ proclaimed to you when you are small and you get infected with the urge to show off yourself someday,” he told The Atlantic.
That small sect’s factious independence undoubtedly echoes in the undiscriminating assortment of subjects that have fallen under Keillor’s wry glance: literary ambition, radio, dogmatism and prim religious indignation itself, and everything in between. For example, in Keillor’s short story “WLT (The Edgar Area)”— included in the collection Happy To Be Here and later bundled with other stories to become the foundation of his 1991 novel WLT: A Radio Romance—an early radio pioneer becomes obsessively haunted by the possibility of indecent material creeping onto the airwaves and invading the homes of listeners. So he formulates a broadcasting code (“The Principles of Radiation”) to instruct his staff against that eventuality: “‘By the grace of God, it is given to us to cast our bread on distant waters,’” he wrote in the code. ‘‘‘See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.’ Eph. 5:15.’” Later, someone plants a mildly racy story in place of the intended script for a regular monologist, parts of which are read on the air. As a precaution against another such incident, the announcer prepares a reserve script, but the reserve script is inevitably spiced up anyway after decades of rewrites in the hands of others.
“Friendly Neighbor” (also used to seed WLT: A Radio Romance) incorporates a similar satirical scenario when the career of Walter “Dad” Benson, an old-time Midwest broadcaster with a worshipful regional following, ends days after he crosses a repressive line of decency by depicting the plight of a girl whose father has decided to spend Christmas with his mistress. Along with other Keillor staples—such as the absurd thread in which Benson serves as a cultural intermediary in a supposed statewide rivalry between Minnesota and North Dakota—the elegiac “Friendly Neighbor” also hints at a spiritual dimension in Keillor’s work. In a eulogy, a Reverend Weiss recalls telling Benson, “You were a pastor of the flock as much as I, or perhaps more so, for your sermons were in the form of stories, as the parables of old, and brought home spiritual truths far better than preaching ever could.”
“The U.S. government was corrupt, dishonest, but the culture of the American people was honest, decent, and profoundly sane, and the germs of this sanity were carried by folk songs,” Peter Scholl quoted Keillor as saying of his early days as a disc jockey in Scholl’s 1993 critical study. Like the American roots music he favored, Keillor has often been a stealthy voice of Lefty dissent, offering a commentary on the powers that be with a unique license afforded by his practical religiosity and equal-opportunity application of the heartland’s no-nonsense, self-aware skepticism.
In one memorable bit during an early 2003 broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the performance of a folk diddy was interrupted by a fake news bulletin reporting that the Department of Homeland Security had raised a “fuchsia” alert over concerns that the Second Coming had taken place. George W. Bush, interviewed by a National Public Radio correspondent, noted that neither he nor any of the “Axis of Evangelicals” officials at the broadcasting conference he was attending had been sucked up and urged calm, theorizing that missing people may have simply duct-taped themselves in too securely. (It turned out that large numbers of Lutherans had disappeared, leaving one Lutheran bishop—interviewed by phone— free of his wife and the duty to prepare a Sunday sermon and allowing him to fulfill his desire to check out one of those dancing clubs “where they turn the lights down low and you don’t necessarily know who it is you’re dancing with.”)
Accused later for blaspheming, Keillor responded, “I am a Christian and grew up fundamentalist and we always joked about the rapture. If that’s blasphemy, then you should go minister to the Sanctified Brethren. And it’s plain idolatry to place a man beyond the reach of satire. It’s pure 100 percent blasphemy and idolatry. I could say more about you false Christians on the Right and you wouldn’t like to hear it, sir.”
While characterized by Keillor’s customary whimsy, the rapture parody stands out for its sharpness by, among other things, raising questions about who among his constituency Bush thinks is going to hell. But, as a whole, Keillor’s humor is defined by its lightness, in contrast, for example, to the stories of George Saunders, a humorist of a subsequent generation whose work Keillor has blurbed admiringly. Saunders, like Keillor, employs empathetic characters who drown in their own reality but manage to convey more than they know. Saunders too exploits the coarseness of corporate nomenclature for comic effect, and manages touching humanist narratives amid the satire. But while Keillor often seems to pivot wildly in pursuit of the next joke to be found, Saunders appears more disciplined. He consistently renders a dark refraction of contemporary society—like a parallel universe that broke from our own sometime around 1994—to say something about what we might become, or perhaps what we really are.
Keillor has consistently disclaimed the burdens of being “a giant and a vast force for good in our time,” to use a formulation he offered to The Atlantic. But of his superficially more frivolous role as an advice columnist, he said in his valedictory submission, “Nothing human is beneath a writer’s attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did.”
Ultimately, what you get out of Keillor rests heavily on the highly subjective issue of whether you think he’s funny. On his own behalf, Keillor has summarized himself this way: “I’m a late-middle-aged mid-list fair-to-middling writer with a comfortable midriff, and it gives me quite a bit of pleasure.”