The critic who lit up my week and more

The Column: 05.03.24

April was an awfully good month for me, so good that I’ve been walking around St. Paul, looking up into the branches of trees, making sure there isn’t an anvil roosting in one of them that’s waiting to fall and kill me and thereby serve justice. I’m a happy old man in love with my wife and in touch with good friends and I’ve been on the road doing good shows at which, among other things, the audience sings beautifully some songs they and I have known by heart since we were in grade school and now, on top of all this, my book Cheerfulness, in which I attempt to defend the title attitude against our present Age of Dread & Gloom, has gotten a long, intense, brilliant review by Meghan O’Gieblyn in Middle West Review, the spring issue. Only a fellow writer can know what this means. A lot.

I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.

She writes, “In the age of doomscrolling, eco-anxiety, and runaway AI nightmares, truth on which our fractured polis seems to agree is that the world is going to hell, cheerfulness has become an unmistakable symptom of self-delusion, willful blindness, or blithe ignorance of one’s privilege.”

I beg to differ with the fractured polis. Delusion, blindness, ignorance are three monkeys I’ve known from time to time, but when I stand and sing bass with a couple thousand people in Spokane or Boise or Burlington or Bethesda, singing from memory, no googling, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” including the watchfires of the camps, the dews and damps, the flaring lamps, it would be willful ignorance not to be cheered truly and deeply. And to be scrutinized closely and praised by a fellow professional means everything. The respect of one righteous person is worth more than a silver chalice from the Federation of Associated Arts Organizations.

And as if that’s not enough, the Avon, Minnesota, Chamber of Commerce has invited me to be Grand Marshal of a parade on June 15 celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Lake Wobegon Trail, a 65-mile biking/hiking trail on the old Soo Line railbed. I will be there, marching. I will also stand up in the Avon Amphitheater and talk about Lake Wobegon, my hometown, which is supposedly nearby. There will be a craft fair, petting zoo, 5K Run/Walk, turtle races, fishing contest, beer garden, and a Food Court serving sloppy joes, corndogs, cheese curds, and pork chops on a stick. Fireworks at dusk. There will be a booth where I will sit under a sign, “Tell Your Story To A Novelist,” where people can come and whisper a story to me and I’ll try to put it into my new Lake Wobegon book. More novelists should consider doing this sort of thing.

If you haven’t read Garrison Keillor’s Cheerfulness, what are you waiting for? Get yourself on the sunny side of life with this “sharp and buoyant” book!

CLICK HERE to buy a copy today!