Main Street's Shy Revisionist

By John Skow

HAPPY TO BE HERE by Garrison Keillor

Atheneum; 210 pages; $11.95

Garrison Keillor is the somewhat moonstruck and lately much celebrated rustic whimsyfier whose monologues from Lake Woebegon, Minn., embellish Public Radio's Saturday evening country-music broadcasts. The first response of an uninitiated listener is likely to be, "That fellow is being funny," and the second, uttered with reproach, "No, that fellow is being serious."

What gives Keillor's comic voice its amiable singularity in this excellent first collection of sketches and stories is a quality hard to describe without making him seem fatuous and the describer sound balmy. He is in love with the upper Midwest, with the region and the people that Sinclair Lewis derided. He is rooted, fond of hickishness, fascinated by the utter, daft strangeness of the ordinary. At 39, he lives in St. Paul, not far from where he grew up, and although he has taken note of East Coast sophistication to the extent of sending most of these pieces to The New Yorker, he is firmly in place as a gifted regional humorist.

Not all of Keillor's jokes are rural; he raises an eyebrow ever so slightly at the Midwesternizing of the counterculture in his parody of a shopping-guide ad for "St. Paul's Episcopal Drop-In Hair Center (in the rectory basement)" where the Rev. Ray and the Rev. Don, trained barbers, "offer warm, supportive pre-and post-trim counseling . . . and if you just want to come in and talk about haircuts, well, that's cool too." Another ad, inserted by a people's used-furniture collective, condemns alienating queen-size beds, recommending instead "our Warm Valley Bed . .. narrow and soft and shaped like a trough, gently urging its occupants toward the middle: the bed of commitment." There is a hesitant manifesto titled "Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?" by a militant shy who confesses that "while we don't have a Shy Pride Week, we do have many private moments when we keep our thoughts to ourselves, such as 'Shy is nice,' 'Walk short,' 'Be proud--shut up' and 'Shy is beautiful, for the most part.' "

Psychologized baseball produces the following shared experience as a manager assesses his season: "After talking with the pitchers, we agreed that pitching less hard was their way of punishing themselves for past losses and perpetuating their self-image as 'bad' pitchers. We agreed that this was childish behavior, and we tried to write a new scenario, or game plan, in which the umpire was cast in the role of persecutor and a hard pitch in the strike zone would 'hurt' him. Unfortunately we did not include the catcher (whom I'll call 'Milt') in these sessions. Milt felt that the hard pitches were aimed at him personally and unconsciously tried to 'escape' from them, which resulted in many passed balls . . . With more counseling and perhaps more protective equipment, I feel that Milt can make a real contribution."

Keillor loves names and hypnotizes himself by repeating them in the best long pieces in his book. There is the "North Dakota Prairie Queen, the jewel of the plains," a luxury train he invents in a reminiscence by a crazed old railroader. Dance bands played regularly on the Prairie Queen, and they had great names: "The Kolachy Brothers, the Big Pisek Hot Band, Cecil Pootz and His Grafton Spuds, the Wonderbar Orchestra, and yes, the great Bill Baroon and His Paloreenies . . ." A marvelously spurious history of radio in Minneapolis produces "Wingo Beals and His Blue Movers," who lost their SunRise Waffle show at 5 a.m. daily to Slim Graves and His Southland Sheiks, featuring Courteous Carl Harper, the Guitar Man. "Rise and shine," Slim would tell his listeners every day, "sit up and howl, there's daylight in the swamps!"

This is a nostalgia gone delightfully mad, and the reader is happy to inhale it by the cubic yard. But it comes flirtatiously close to novelizing, a practice Keillor claims in a funny preface to have forsworn after one grotesquely bad unpublishable failure. He writes short pieces, he says, in homage to The New Yorker's former great infield of James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White.

A great infield indeed, and mighty fine homage. But doubts are raised. The straightest story in the book is also a very good one--an account of a 17-year-old boy named Don, who, following normal teen-age tropisms ("I know you hate to see me playing rock 'n' roll,/ But Mom, I gotta break your heart to save my soul"), performs in a punk rock band whose acts feature the musicians biting the feathers off a live chicken. The group is successful, naturally. Hallelujah, except that Don, a nice, decent fellow, realizes queasily at the story's end that he faces an indeterminate future of biting the feathers off chickens. This is good comedy, but Don is so much more than a shadow figure in a joke that the reader wonders whether there may not be a novel in him somewhere, trying to get out.

--By John Skow

Excerpt

"After Bobby Jo's phone call, I got another from the Lawston Foundry, informing me that Stan Lewandowski's sculpture, Oppresso, would not be cast in time for the opening of the Minot Performing Arts Center. The foundry workers, after hearing what Lewandowski was being paid for creating what looked to them like a large gerbil cage, went out on strike . . . I wasted fifteen minutes trying to make a lunch date with Hugo Groveland, the mining heir, to discuss the Arts Mall. He was going away for a while . . . He hinted at dark personal tragedies . . . and suggested I call his mother. 'She's more your type,' he said, 'plus she's about to kick off if you know what I mean."

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