Special to the Star Tribune
The New Yorker of yore, a seemingly can't-miss satirical topic that Garrison Keillor somehow misfires upon in his latest satire, once ran a cartoon showing three separate piles of manuscript. The first heap, Everest-high, was labeled "novel." Mound two, half as tall, was captioned "novella." The final drawing, a tiny stack of paper, was dubbed "novel-eenie."
In "Love Me," Keillor's newest fiction, one senses roughly six bloated novel-eenies in search of an author, a point or a direction beyond the main character's obsession with priapism and impotence. For that we have the later work of Norman Mailer.
What we needed from Keillor was to take the book's promising half-dozen skeins of narrative, and neatly weave them together into an inspired quilt. Instead, he has given us 272 pages that read as if they were coarsely sutured together with dental floss and a redemptive ending.
All would have been forgiven if the laughs-to-pages quotient had approached Keillor's ratio in such wonderful comic novels as "Lake Wobegon Days" (1985) and "WLT: A Radio Romance" (1991). Unfortunately, one is unable to critique "Love Me" in words better than Keillor himself used to put down the Coen brothers perfectly rendered film "Fargo." Their satire, Keillor said, "was like driving toward Bismarck, N.D., at 10 miles an hour. You had a lot of time to see where you were going and wishing you didn't have to."
Then again, competition was never Keillor's strong suit, a fact he often funnily infers throughout "Love Me" via his not-so-fictional sounding protagonist, Minnesota writer Larry Wyler. Even when he elicits the yucks, however, it is clear this is not your father's Garrison Keillor.
Take what happens near the beginning of the novel, when Random House publishes a well-received and remunerated book by one of Wyler's old Minnesota pals. In humor so dark it makes Terry Southern sound like a member of Up With People, Larry relates how he wanted his friend to "choke on a bratwurst and fall down and hit his head so that he'd be in a wheelchair, steering it with a pencil between his teeth, and I could do a benefit for him, to raise money to pay for his colostomy."
Okey-doke then.
Larry quickly gains revenge by publishing an even bigger bestseller and fleeing St. Paul for a gig at the New Yorker, leaving behind his boring-as-bean-dip wife for Manhattan and the arms of every anonymous female he can seduce.
Keillor has a great idea in lampooning the tonnage of alternately maudlin, scandalous, or noxiously genteel memoirs penned by alumni of the pre-Tina Brown New Yorker. Unfortunately, Keillor took his gift for hitting the satirical home run and chose to bunt.
So Larry plays a heated game of ping-pong with a trash-talking S.J. Perelman (an aristocratic and distant presence in real life). Or he gets loaded with profanely loquacious editor-in-chief William Shawn (who was famously prim and fussy). Or he watches J.D. Salinger on "The Hollywood Squares." (Actually, that was funny).
Along the way, Larry discovers the New Yorker's legendary clubbiness has more to do with John Gotti than John Hersey. Calvin Trillin's real name is Buddy Calvino, and he's not from Kansas City but Palermo. Brendan Gill was born Brentano Guillermo, and the fiction editor is Roger Angeli, stepson of E.B. Blanco, who "wrote about Carlotta the pig and Stuart Piccolo."
Back in Minnesota, real-life master talents don't even get that thimbleful of wit. Could that choral director named "Bruno Phillips" be Philip Brunelle? The brewmeister family who once made Hamms beer is the "Hampls." Even Keillor's local bad guys are given creative short-shrift: the evil Republican mayor of St. Paul is simply named "Norm."
Sadly, a dominant thread of Keillor's novel-eenie could have made an excellent tragic-comic novel. Even sadder, Nathanael West already wrote that book two generations ago, calling it "Miss Lonelyhearts." Still, at his best, Keillor might have come up with at least a fitting homage.
Salon magazine hired Keillor in 1998 to write an advice column titled Mr. Blue. In "Love Me," Wyler is hired by the Minneapolis Star Journal to write an advice column titled Mr. Blue. Soon he is corresponding with "Distressed" and "Astonished" and "Horrified" and "Floundering" to no particular effect.
Yet even here, in the only book Keillor has published that reads like product not prose, those of us who remember his best novels find reason for hope. It comes at the end of "Love Me," after a humbled and wizened Larry Wyler returns to St. Paul and recounts to his wife what a fictional F. Scott Fitzgerald said when he returned to Minnesota chastened: "A man can pull out of his tailspin and land safely. The ship can find its way back to port."
"He was talking," relates the tale's narrator, "to his memories."
Talk to your memories, Garrison, and you can come back, too.
Neal Karlen is the author of several nonfiction books, including "Slouching Toward Fargo" a first-person account of two seasons traveling with the St. Paul Saints baseball team.