Customer Reviews

Happy to Be Here

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've only thus far read 3 GK books (Lake Wob./H2BH/Leaving Home), but this is definitely a neck-in-neck rival with Lake Wobegon Days. If there's any doubt as to whether or not this is a good buy, then just check it out of the library and read "The Tip-Top Club". You'll have to buy it, because you'll want to read it more than once!

I once had the great good fortune to win, from Penguin Books, a scroll with a long quote from Garrison Keillor on it (and signed by him). It's the only thing I've ever won except for a beer key chain. It's a quote about books. Part of it was on the cover of one edition of "We Are Still Married". The rest is on my wall. It's very profound, about how people always say the book is going away, and yet it survives. I've also dipped into a bit of GK: The Book of Guys, We Are Still Married, and heard bits from The Prarie Home Companion.

Most of this book appeared in The New Yorker. I think how most of P.G. Wodehouse (the funniest writer not still alive) appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and it makes me think that if you don't make it in New York you don't make it at all. Those days laid a secure foundation for the then young writer such that he could later broadcast from Minnesota, but I'm not sure he could have started there.

That said, this is one of the funniest books I've ever read, up there with Sein Language by Jerry Seinfeld, Without Feathers by Woody Allen, and the Jeeves books of the immortal Wodehouse. But the delight in it is the same as in Wodehouse: in the nuances of language, the pastiche of a certain kind of speech, bringing to the heartland the mainspring of British comedy: a delight in the various dialects as translated into writing. Of this last, Keillor is a master.

Among the gushing praise blurbs in the not nearly so well designed mass market paperback I read is one from Roy Blount Jr. that says "This book will leave you either dumbfounded or happy-- almost deservedly happy-- to be anywhere." There's a sense of place here that heightens the senses while it relaxes the soul, and once having been to Keillor's midwest, wherever you are becomes special and different. The placeness comes across.

It's a bit of a wonder that in "WLT", to my mind the most perfect piece here, Keillor can write about 1919 and the birth of local radio like he was there. No, it's not Doug Adams, not an SF cavalcade of the fantastic, it's hitchhiking across this vast unknown tract of space and time, immersed everywhere in a sense of place. And to find, to one's surprise, that somehow the book survives, to pause within its pages to rest, relax, and look around, happy to be here.

Well, that fellow Keillor is a fairly sharp cookie. He's got what most of those political characters don't---his finger on the pulse of middle America. Of course, I'm referring to big shots, top bananas, fat cats, football stars, Lexus drivers, idols of stage and screen or people with 2,096 friends on Facebook. They live different lives altogether. No, I mean your average American like Joe Sixpack or Kellie Sewall who lives just down the street here in town. She certainly knows a writer when she finds one. Mr. Keillor is quite humorous and sometimes displays a a rare sense of earnest whimsy---or would that be "whimsical earnestness"? I'm not one of your top writers, I guess, though my mom would have loved me to be one. I don't really know. But Mr. Keillor certainly gets into all the nooks and crannies of the vast panorama that is your daily American life away from New York Timesville and outside the Beltway. He just has a knack for it, I guess, and he has talent too. Of course, if you're going to read this selection from cover to cover---and I always read each book cover to cover---my mom taught us to do that---"Don't give up easily", she told us, "it might turn out to be good later"---anyway, if you persevere, you may find that this book of his is a bit like avocado dip. A little goes a long way. Sure, you could space your readings out and take more time to savor each chapter. Some people like to do that. But not me, because of my mom. A few stories in here contain pathos, others bring out nostalgia for an America before Internet, cell phones, and reality TV, when people actually spoke to each other, had meetings, ate dinners in public halls, and travelled on trains. But you can't stop progress, as they say.

I would like to finish my review by saying that if you've ever listened to "Prairie Home Companion" or read any Lake Wobegon stories, you'll certainly like this book. Most of Keillor's books are above average just like the kids in his hometown. They belong to a genre that's slightly apart from what is usually thought of as "literature". That's why I haven't given it more stars.
Anyway, if you didn't like those other things, then I guess you'd better read something else. That's life, I suppose.

These classic routines are now being milked ad infinitum each week. Keillor has given up trying to resist a cloying public and has decided to pander to them. Even tall radio comedians need love.

The comedy overflows with familiar icons of childhood and small-town American life - daydreams and disappointments, baseball and Boy Scouts, lawn ornaments and storm windows, Main Street and Founder's Square. But Keillor works his local-color material so that it debunks the same sentimentality and nostalgia that it evokes. In the final analysis the narrator's praise for small-town America is about as trustworthy as a prepuescent boy's booming baritone.

Such a complex fella. Keillor left Lake Wobegone for a clear and understandable reason: he was stultified by the environment and the atmosphere where "artsy" types were viewed with deep suspicion and contempt.

However, this was the ground he stood on, unlike so many others, and it became his lifelong meal ticket...

ISBN 0140092315 - To be honest, I'd like to get back the time I spent reading this book. It's not awful, it's not particularly good, but I found little in it that appealed to me and I wouldn't read it again. Keillor seems like the kind of guy it would be fun to have a drink with, but Happy To Be Here? Eh.

- AnnaLovesBooks

This collection has some passages that can be used for audition monologues. As most actors know, funny audition material is hard to come by.