Customer Reviews

Love Me

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

 

 

Garrison Keillor is such a talented storyteller, and in a way, I sometimes think of him as the modern day Salinger. I breezed right through this book! He tells the story of a struggling writer who strikes success with his first novel and moves to New York, leaving his wife behind to pursue his dreams. However, once he gets there, he is hit hard with writer's block, cannot write, and from there on his life begins its downward spiral. Will he redeem himself? I especially recommend this book to writers or aspiring writers of fiction, and also to anyone who enjoys an "over the top" story.

I'll be honest, I'm not necessarily into books that describe old people in a somewhat sad state of love, but this book does a fantastic job. In a sense, there are two stories going on. One an unrealistic but hilarious satire of both New York and of professional writers, where John Updike and others play a significant role in the plot. The other is an underlying theme of love between two mismatched individuals, one who desires greatness and the other who desires equality for those without greatness. The Main character, unable to write more books, takes up a job as an advice columnist named "Mr. Blue" and writes some amazingly clever and witty responses to some of the individuals who write to him. All the while he grows both further apart and closer to his wife, who remains in Minnesota I promise you that this book is not what you'd expect. It was very enjoyable, extremely witty and imaginative and worth the time.

Get this if you need to laugh.If you find yourself on the dark side of middle age and have found yourself wondering what was it all about,anyway?(your life),you need this book.Wildly romantic,immensely tender-hearted,and wickedly funny.Perfect for a read by the fire.Garrison is a wondrus human,and this book is not to be missed.

This is a novel of uneven quality. I will start with the best parts: Minnesotan writer gets job at The New Yorker. Hilarious soliloquies of a fictionalized William Shawn exhorting the narrator who is suffering from extended writer's block to keep writing. Skip right to page 146 or so. I was in tears. It's a loving send up of an enduring literary icon.

The Crossandotti character also gave me a stomachache. I just laughed so much. He is the philistine publisher of the esteemed magazine and wants to buy Field and Stream and merge the two mags into The New Yonder.

The parts that were disappointing were about how Mr. Blue came to be. I loved the Mr. Blue advice column on love and writing which ran on Slate.com. I thought the columns would be reprinted in Love Me. However, only a few of the mediocre pieces are included here.

The horrible parts - I think the novel would have been improved had these been omitted entirely - are the love affairs the narrator has with random women who throw themselves at him because he is a one time best selling novelist, though he is 50 pounds overweight and not handsome. These sex scenes are gratuitous, a not well thought out heterosexual middle age fantasies thrown in for no good purpose.

An incredible character is Iris, the wife. Battered by loneliness and tired of having unlasting affairs, the narrator goes back to her. She kind of takes him back at the very end because after all they are good friends. I found her total lack of bitterness and sarcasm to be shallow characterization. She too is a heterosexual middle age male fantasy: yes, dude, you can have affairs and your wife will take you back in the end.

Looking back, it is an Odyssey theme - Ulysses is trying to get back home but all these different women are luring him from achieving his goal. However, Iris is a poorly rendered Penelope. Penelope spends decades weaving and surreptitiously undoing a hopelessly long tapestry so that she can keep waiting for Ulysses to come home - she is sure he is alive and is on his way home. She is also making excuses and avoiding having to marry a local handsome and powerful warlord who is persistently wooing her. In contrast, Iris lacks depth and credibility. She is a simpleton who does not have deep anxieties or doubts.

I grew up listening to Garrison Keillor on NPR and read this book just before I moved away from MN. It hit home with what I love and some times hated about the midwest. It's one of those books that haves stuck with me as I've traveled and one of the books that I love to recommend to friends and family.

The enterprising Larry Wyler is frustrated with life in St. Paul, and his marriage to Iris, an earnest Democrat out to save the world one homeless person at a time. Larry is a writer and longs to live in the literary world, though he's lucky if he sells enough articles to pay the heat bill. After a bout with a bad head cold and heavy doses of antihistamines, echinacea, Vitamin C and zinc, he manages to write a best selling novel, Spacious Skies, that shoots to the top of the best seller list and earns him a ticket to Manhattan, a million-dollar apartment with a fabulous terrace and view, and an office at The New
Yorker magazine among the writers he has admired his whole life and the legendary editor William Shawn. And Iris isn't at all interested in going to New York. She's satisfied with the bungalow in St. Paul, her work at the shelter, and besides, she wants to put in another row of butter beans next spring. So Larry moves to New York alone and lives the wonderful life of an author. Until he suffers from a severe case of writer's block after his follow-up novel, Amber Waves of Grain, bombs badly. An invitation to write a newspaper advice column, "Ask Mr. Blue," for the paper back home provides a much needed distraction (and steady paycheck). It's a pretty low rung on the literary ladder, but writing commonsense advice to the lonely and the frustrated initiates Larry's own long recovery and thanks to the miracle of email, he can do the whole column from New York. He doles out wisdom to Exasperated, whose wife gives up her judgeship for figure skating; Nice Lady, who is abusive to the obese; and Secular Humanist, who suddenly notices his girlfriend is Amish. Slowly, painfully, Wyler discovers that the
literary world he's dreamed of all his life isn't all he thought it was and he finds a measure of clarity for his own life. And then he sets out to win back his wife's affection.

Keillor is one of my favorite authors, and this little book didn't disappoint. He's a humorist with a keen insight and a way with words that I find very entertaining. This book wouldn't necessarily be classed as humor, since it is a novel, but it was very funny. Had me rolling a couple of times and chuckling all through it.

Garrison Keillor has the most endearing ability to make us look at ourselves and not be too ashamed. It's ok, most of us are mediocre. We cannot help it, relax. But we must never take ourselves too serious either. Aside from the great study of human folly, this book must contain the funniest description of writer's block. I got LOVE ME from the library and ended up copying all the pages on which "Larry Wyler" converses with his boss William Shawn,the real editor of New Yorker magazine. Readers, if you want to become writers, too, then read this book for all its wistful insight about trying to write well. ENJOY!

Tackling some Arthur Miller themes with equal pathos but with a much healthier dose of humor, Garrison Keillor reinforced my admiration of both his writing dexterity and his ability to capture human emotions. He touches places that you thought were unique to you... and exposes the paranoid amongst us as just plain normal people. This is a book I was so disappointed to finish... I enjoyed every page and would recommend it wholeheartedly. I'm off now to re-read Keillor's earlier work with fresh vigour!

If you've listened to "Prairie Home Companion," then you probably do not need to read this book. The same somewhat scattered approach is used here to tell a slightly humorous but often patience-trying story. There are simply too many writerly indulgences on view here. Never mind the autobiographical overlay; the characters are just not sympathetic and (excuse me for saying it) the author needs to focus more on the reader's needs than his own. Okay for a Keillor fan.

I enjoyed Garrison Keillor's "Lake Woebegone Days," but his penchant for spewing his political opinions in otherwise non-political pieces has made me chary of his more recent work. (I notice he has a book about being a born Democrat, "from the heart:" I haven't chosen to read it. While he certainly isn't using his head, I don't know if he really speaks from the heart. Maybe more from the spleen.) I suppose Mr. Keillor is still successful enough that he does not mind alienating a large portion of his soon-to-be-outta-here audience.

The narrator of "Love Me" does not account for most of the time that passes between college and old age, a bit of sloppiness. There were some flashes of insight and amusing writing, but it could have been condensed into a short story. Not a satisfying story. Probably a true story for Keillor, in some ways. What a drag.