Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Love Me
by Garrison Keillor Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Ups and Downs There are some chapters of Garrison
Keillor’s new novel, Love Me,
that are great. Unfortunately, there are two many chapters in-between that
become tiring and tedious during the search for some good writing. Protagonist
Larry Wyler writes a great debut novel and then leaves both wife and
Minnesota to go to New York, to the pinnacle: The New Yorker, where he
loses his muse, and can’t write worth a damn, while he yields to the
temptations of the big city. It turns out that The New Yorker has been
taken over by the mafia, and Larry is ordered to publish a lousy poem by a
gangster. Meanwhile, Larry’s wife, Iris, remains in Minnesota, as a rock or
normality and reason. At times, Love Me
is hilarious. At other times, it’s wearying, Here’s an excerpt from early in
the book (pp. 13-17): On
the night before the choir took off on our eastern tour, I took her to hear
Doc Evans's Dixieland jazz band play in the courtyard of Walker Art Center,
Iris in her white summer dress, me in my chinos and sport coat. We sat on the
cool grass by a hedge and she glanced at my crotch and said, "There are
holes in your pants." Which there were. You could see London and France.
"You must've brushed against something with acid on it." I
ignored this and lit a cigarette. It was a perfect summer night in the North,
a hot clarinet, a crowd of lovers in the dark, smoking, lying on the grass
and on each other, engines revving, stoplights turning green all over town,
every song about sex, none about wise career choices, all about kissing and
feeling your heart go boom, and meanwhile the summer breeze is blowing
through the holes in my pants, which definitely are getting bigger. We head
back to her apartment and I take off the pants and we go to bed and make
love. So sweet and true. And the next morning, we're on the bus heading for
Madison, South Bend, Cleveland, Syracuse, and New York City. I'm sitting next
to Iris and she dozes with her head on my shoulder. Everyone can look at us
and see: They're a couple. They sleep together.
Sex written all over us. We
were all pumped up for the tour. This was no rinky-dink thing, The Bobbsey
Twins Sing Bach, this was a real kick-ass choir. We're
serious about this in Minnesota. We do choir as well as anybody in the world.
We were brought up for it. Stood in Zion Lutheran with folks who never said
boo in real life, and the organ played "Ein feste burg ist
unser Gott" and my God, a cathedral of sound rose up
through the floorboards and out your scalp, the Sacred Harmonic Convergence
of the Blessed Are the Meek, and now in a packed hall in Cleveland we sing
the St. Matthew Passion, and there are tears glittering
in the front row, noses are blown, stunned faces, and again in Syracuse—just
as Bruno Phillips has told us, "We are going to sing so that they will
remember this for the rest of their lives. There is no other reason to do it,
folks, none"—and two nights later, at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on
Central Park West in New York City. Oh, my God. Our driver missed the exit on
the Thruway and wound up on the New Jersey Turnpike and then it took two
hours to turn around and come through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Manhattan,
Bruno Phillips sitting tall and composed behind the driver, and in the
anxiety of arriving late, we forgot to be nervous about our New York debut,
we just hustled off the bus and peed and combed our hair, and filed onto the
stage twenty minutes late and the audience gave us a standing ovation. There
were standees in back, people sitting in the aisles. We sang the best St.
Matthew of our lives and those New Yorkers wept openly—old Broadway
actresses, crooked financiers, admen, Jewish socialists, atheists, fingers
stained yellow from tobacco, breath redolent of gin and vermouth—they were
transformed into angels by ]. S. Bach's faith in Christ's sacrifice
and they rose to their feet and drenched us in applause and shouts and we
stood and soaked in it. People shouting "Thank you" and "God
bless you." (A Minneapolis audience would've turned and walked out and
gotten in their cars and driven home and turned on the news, but never mind.)
So we sang "Children of the Heavenly Father" for aneacor~And then
the "Hallelujah Amen." The applause wore us out. We walked off in a
daze and Iris and I wandered into Central Park in
the dark, into the Sheep Meadow and stood holding hands and I asked her to
marry me. "Tonight?" she said. No, I said, when we get home.
"Sounds good to me," she said. Let
us not to the marriage of people who know what they want Admit
impediments. Love doesn't vary Like
you might change your hair style from pixie to bouffant Or
throw away your swimsuit in January. Oh
no, it is an ever fixed mark That
looks on tempests and is never shaken. It
laughs at death and gooses statues in the park And
loves a cheeseburger with extra bacon. Love's
not time's fool though rosy lips and cheeks Get
all wrinkly and veiny and saggy and gnarly. Love
alters not with its brief hours and weeks So
don't give up on it, Charley. If
this be a big mistake and we wind up hissing and snarling "There
is nobody I'd rather be wrong with than you, my darling. I
knew so little about her. She was a good person, a good alto. A true-blue
feminist and Democrat out to save the world like her heroes Dorothea Dix and
Jane Addams and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and also a Golden Gophers hockey fan
who leaped to her feet when the team scored and whooped and yelled and sang
"Minnesota, Hats Off to Thee" and shouted out the Rah rah
rah for Ski-u-Mah. Her father was a Lutheran minister
from Wisconsin, so she knew the power of principled blockheads to drive you
nuts, and her maternal grandfather led the plumbers out on strike in 1915
crying, "If they won't pay a living wage, let them shit in the
streets!" so she also knew the power of united action to bring about
change. She got her degree in social work and was hired by Lutheran Social
Services as a caseworker and discovered her calling in life, which was to
rescue old people from the ravages of longevity. She became the Susan B.
Anthony of demented geezerdom. She was a great woman. She went out one day to
track down somebody's lost grandpa, and found him living in filth in a
plywood shack near the Dayton's Bluff freight yard. He'd been a mover and
shaker in the Republican party, a federal judge for twenty-five years, a
patron of the arts, a man who once dined with Ike at the White House, and now
he was filthy and out of his mind, and she roped him in and brought him to
the hospital and made sure that his needs were attended to and that the
newspapers wouldn't find out, and took the afternoon off and married me, at
the courthouse in Hudson, Wisconsin, August 4, 1966, with a bouquet of
dandelions in her hand. No fancy wedding for her because the expense was
ridiculous and what did we need it for? Dandelions are fine. We
called our parents from a coffee shop and gave them the big news. My father
said, "What did you go and do that for?" He was miffed, but then he
always is. My mother said, "I hope you'll be happy" in a tone of
voice that said. Six months. A year at most.
They were on their way to play in the 3M Parade of Plaid golf tournament. My
parents live in their own little world. May to October at Dellwood, winters
in Palm Beach. They golf eighteen holes three or four times a week and attend
a cocktail party every single night and in their pink lady and martini haze
are honestly not aware that some people do not have two homes. We don't talk
except when absolutely necessary and we haven't come to that point yet. We
attended Iris's dad's church in Hopkins that Sunday and he introduced us from
the pulpit and people clapped and he had us come up front for a special
blessing and then he preached on fruitfulness. It was a twenty-five-minute
sermon and all through it I thought about how nice it would be to get back
into Iris's pants. The Rev. and Mrs. O'Blennis took us to dinner at the
Tremont and the Rev was still revved up about fruitfulness; he asked Iris if
she had a bun in the oven. She said no. "What do you do, if I may
ask?" he said to me. "I am a writer, sir," I said. "I'm working
on a novel." For all the work I had done on that novel, I might as well
have said, "I am working on a cure for the common cold," but he
seemed satisfied with my being a novelist and keeping busy novelizing. They
were sweet old birds. He said to the Missus, "Well, it's a big occasion,
our little girl going off and getting married," and he ordered a bottle
of red wine and they got slightly potted and then he had a big glass of tawny
port and I thought he might burst into song. "When can you two come up
to the cabin?" he cried. The Missus fussed over the fact that Iris was
keeping her last name, which was customary among young progressive women in
those days. Her mother worried, "How does Larry feel about that? What's
wrong with Wyler?" Larry felt fine about that and everything else. Had
no dough and no great prospects, but I had the girl, and that was good enough
for me. Midwesterners and especially Minnesotans,
will really enjoy Love Me.
The rest of us will find parts of it funny. New Yorkers will be amazed by the
depiction of their city. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the October 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Love
Me.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
