Happy To Be Here - Garrison Keillor

I picked this up after having seen it sitting on the shelf in Sidcup’s now defunct Oxfam Bookshop for months and months. There were quite a few Garrison Keillor books, and having read nothing by him or heard anything of him I simply plumped for the one with the best cover.

Incidentally, I’ve heard there are many tests for deciding whether you’ll like a book, from the cover selection I employed in Sidcup, to ‘the page 69 test‘, which I now use without fail. Simply pick up the book and read page 69. If you like it, odds are you’ll apparently like the rest of the book, the theory being that page 69 is far enough in to have passed the initial enthusiasm of the author and to have got into the style and plot that the book is likely to stick to.

Anyway, as it turns out Keillor is a humourist who specialises in short, witty stories for publications such as The New Yorker. Not really my preferred cup of tea, but a three-hour bus journey leaves me in want of some light reading (buses are truly one of the least ideal reading environments I can think of, and certainly Italo Calvino doesn’t list them at the start of ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…’ while considering the most comfortable position to read in:

‘Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.’

Despite the lack of legroom I get into Keillor quite easily, bouncing from story to story with the odd snigger here and titter there, but certainly no guffawing (but then I’ve never been one to laugh out loud while reading, except for on exceptional occasions, with John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ being one of them).

I was most tickled by the story ‘Shy Rights: Why not Pretty Soon?’, in which the attempts to form a movement of shy people are catalogued, and mostly re-buffed by the fact of their being shy.

‘Now is probably as good a time as any for this country to face up to its shameful treatment of the shy and to do something, almost anything, about it. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to wait for a while and see what happens. All I know is that it isn’t easy trying to write a manifesto for a bunch of people who dare not speak their names.’ (p.215)

The narrator also covers the injustices of history in which shy people ’who never sought fame’ are ignored, a man who is too shy to speak up when he is overcharged by $15 for some candy and a ‘dirty’ magazine, and the ‘anti-shy’ sixth amendment, which ’gives the accused the right to confront his accusers’.

Keillor pretty goes by this watchword all along. Take a simple everyday idea, flip it on its head and look at it again. It works nearly every time as he forays through the world of mid-American radio stations and baseball fanatics, but rarely with as much success as in ‘Shy Rights’. He’s like a slightly less psychoanalysis-obsessed version of Woody Allen on the page, and is pleasant enough for it.

Next time I have a daunting bus journey ahead of me, maybe I’ll try and grab myself another Keillor.