Garrison Keillor. We Are Still Married (1989)

     Garrison Keillor. We Are Still Married (1989) I know Keillor’s breathy, hesitant, ruminative style of story telling from NPR’s The Prairie Home Companion, and that voice sounds in my imagination when I read these pieces. Keillor’s trick is to combine the mundane with the bizarre, the everyday respectable life with the occasional escape into the disreputable. He tends to melancholy, a gentle nostalgia for the good things of life which we will leave behind when we die, but that should be enjoyed while we still can. And while he never delves too deeply into his character’s or persona’s motives, he hints at depths that we can barely perceive, let alone understand.
     The title story illustrates this nicely. A couple, Earl and Willa,  becomes the subject of a reporter’s investigation into the effects of the death of a pet, Biddy, their dog. But the dog recovers, and Blair’s presence alters their relationship, so that Willa becomes an emblem of the ignored, taken for granted, oppressed wife, and makes her mark in print and on TV. Yet in the end they reunite, not because Earl changes, but because Biddy gets sick again, and Willa wants Earl’s company. Earl “takes her back”, with no recriminations, no demands. They get two new dogs, and soon, when spring breaks up the ice on the lake, things “will be as if none of this has ever happened.” Which is of course not true, since Earl has changed despite himself. Most of all, he has accepted Willa as she decides she wants to be. That, I suppose, is why they are still married.
     Good book. *** (2007)