CHEERFULNESS

The former radio-show host offers a book about finding cheer in everyday life.

“Dread is communicable,” writes Keillor at the beginning of his latest book. “Crap is bad for the brain.” This observation is part of the opening salvo from the creator of the syndicated Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companionand the author of many books. Keillor’s book is designed to recall the central and often overlooked value of good cheer in American life, which he characterizes as being in relatively short supply in the modern era. The idea to write a book about cheerfulness, he says, matured in his mind while he was recovering from successful heart surgery in 2022; the concept felt strange to him, like a non-skier writing about skiing: “I went through decades of busy striving and confusion and dissatisfaction,” he remembers, “and now I felt secure in my skis, looking down the steep chute, knees bent, leaning forward, pushing off.” The book’s narrative wanders through Keillor’s memories, pulling in a large cast of aunts, uncles, grandparents, old friends, and colleagues, as well as his parents, portrayed with the warm glow of settled love. It also includes helpings of Keillor’s famously deadpan doggerel poetry. His general observations are intertwined with frequent reflections (he reminds readers often that he’s 80). These memory-glimpses are drawn from his childhood and personal life, as well as his professional career; the latter came to an end with MPR in 2017, following allegations of inappropriate behavior with a female colleague. Keillor denied any wrongdoing, and in the book, he briefly characterizes the separation as the result of “a simple shakedown scheme by a man and woman who’d worked for the show for years.” (A 2018 MPR News feature later reported “a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled.”)

Readers who are nostalgic for A Prairie Home Companionmay be surprised by the valedictory tone of Keillor’s prose throughout this book. Every page feels like a farewell address, every observation is slightly pained, and every personal recollection reads like the last affectionate look-around of a man about to fall off a cliff. The Minnesota humor that permeates so much of Keillor’s earlier prose here feels not only dry, but also mordant. “Of course there’s loneliness and guilt, a sense of meaninglessness—you wonder: why am I here? What did I come in the kitchen looking for? Why am I holding a spatula?” goes one typical passage, at the end of which Keillor offers a plucky but grim punchline: “But the moment passes, thanks to memory loss.” The book has bits of the familiar hangdog humor for which the author was once famous (“It’s cold in Minnesota so I went into radio because it’s indoors and vacuum tubes gave off heat”), but they’re matched with tougher assertions (on quitting drinking: “The way to do it is to do it”) and comments on his acceptance of age: “The beauty of getting old is that I am no longer trying to find myself,” he writes. “I am here, this is me, forlorn mug and all.”

An offbeat, sometimes trenchant personal narrative about the value of joy.