An easy-moving novel of good fun — drollery tinged with intentional bathos, the stock-in-trade of one of America's most famous humorists.
The hero is a writer living in St Paul, Minnesota, supported by his warm-hearted, do-gooder wife Iris. Success is swift but, as it turns out, brief. The New Yorker
publishes some of his work and he becomes rich on the back of a best-selling novel. He wants to go and live in the Big Apple but his wife, unimpressed by fame or money, won't go with him. She prefers a life of good works among the old, the disadvantaged and the homeless of St Paul.
He goes anyway, gets an office at the New Yorker, writes a second novel that does poorly and then suffers writer's block for the rest of his life. His only income is from an advice column under the pseudonym of Mr Blue, and this correspondence carries much of the story in the middle of the book. After years of casual sexual encounters and heavy drinking in New York, he returns to St Paul to court Iris again.
Keillor, as usual, mines his own life for material. For example, he was once an advice columnist for an online magazine, Salon, as Mr Blue. He did have an office at the New Yorker, and in this novel he manages an amusing self-abasement before the famous New Yorker writers while sending them up. And he wastes absolutely nothing: Love Me first appeared as a short story.
Believing the famously prolific Keillor knows anything about writer's block takes some effort. He has written 10 humorous books, produces journalism for magazines, and scripts a weekly radio programme that is famous throughout North America. The distinctive sing-song drawl of his radio voice has been heard in New Zealand through Radio New Zealand which has used some of his programmes to fill in during summer breaks.
Sustaining Keillor's drollery through the long haul of a novel can be hard work and readers will feel the strain occasionally, much as the writer must have. But those who glide over the slow patches will be rewarded by many moments of laugh-aloud fun.
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
* Faber and Faber, $27
