Rating: 
Summary: A Funny, Melancholy, Strange Book
Review: I wanted to like "Love Me"...I even wanted to love it, as I have loved just about everything I've read of Keillor's up to now. But I found myself too confused by the shifts in tone and too puzzled about what it really was supposed to be all about to form any kind of definitive opinion. Is it a rumination on life, love and loss? A hilarious black comedy? A moderately-disguised autobiography? After finishing all 272 pages, I'm just not sure."Love Me" follows the misadventures of Larry Wyler, a writer from Minnesota who publishes a successful novel, leaves his wife and world behind, and answers the siren song of the big city...New York. He buys an apartment overlooking Central Park and goes to work at a topsy-turvy version of the New Yorker that seems mainly designed to skewer the raft of New Yorker insider books we've been flooded with over the past couple of decades. Larry commits adultery, but doesn't seem to know why; he commits murder (sort of), but doesn't have to deal with any of the consequences; and in the end, we're left with....what? It didn't surprise me that when Larry imagined his funeral, he specified a reading from Ecclesiasties be included. I guess it takes one world-weary soul to know another.
Rating:
Summary: A Funny, Melancholy, Strange Book
Review: I wanted to like "Love Me"...I even wanted to love it, as I have loved just about everything I've read of Keillor's up to now. But I found myself too confused by the shifts in tone and too puzzled about what it really was supposed to be all about to form any kind of definitive opinion. Is it a rumination on life, love and loss? A hilarious black comedy? A moderately-disguised autobiography? After finishing all 272 pages, I'm just not sure. "Love Me" follows the misadventures of Larry Wyler, a writer from Minnesota who publishes a successful novel, leaves his wife and world behind, and answers the siren song of the big city...New York. He buys an apartment overlooking Central Park and goes to work at a topsy-turvy version of the New Yorker that seems mainly designed to skewer the raft of New Yorker insider books we've been flooded with over the past couple of decades. Larry commits adultery, but doesn't seem to know why; he commits murder (sort of), but doesn't have to deal with any of the consequences; and in the end, we're left with....what? It didn't surprise me that when Larry imagined his funeral, he specified a reading from Ecclesiasties be included. I guess it takes one world-weary soul to know another.
Rating: 
Summary: "Love Me" Far from Lovable
Review: In a nutshell, the narrator fails to become a big-shot New Yorker writer, sleeps with a lot of women, and finally goes back home to St. Paul where he worms his way back into his wife's good graces. And he stops drinking. So I guess that means he's Redeemed. Well may this novel's title plead "Love Me," because it--and its narrator--is very hard to love. What the narrator takes for depth is actually a list of middlebrow preferences that he loves to list, as proof of his great sensibility: Bach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, an "endive and pear and blue cheese salad," the White Album. He loves to name these touchstones of, for him, cultural worth, and often substitutes naming a person's tastes for characterizing him or her. Sometimes he allows for a different range of tastes, as when he speaks approvingly of some relatives: "men who knew how to set the timing on a Ford V-8, who knew what Anzio was like, and how to rid your tomatoes of bugs, and how the big grain elevators were built without interior or exterior bracing." It's so cheap. Cars, check. The Big One, check. Farming, check. He might as well say they're the Salt of the Earth. He has several characters warn him, Minnesota-style, "Don't get a big head." It's hard not to suspect that Garrison himself didn't hear this a lot as a kid growing up, and he's still resentful about it. Also, I became heartily sick of Keillor's habit of writing long sentences without commas, the clauses connected mostly by ands. What's all this breathlessness in aid of? I think it's meant to create the impression that by god, he's not a pretentious climber, he's just so very sincere that he can't help letting it all tumble out of him in a rush of words. Whatever it is, it's deeply annoying. Just like the novel as a whole.
Rating: 
Summary: The Title Says It All
Review: In this novel, Keillor wants to convince us that he can step away from his Lake Wobegon shtick and try his hand at literature. However, what the reader finds is the same ingredients given the Prodigal Son treatment. in regard to characters Keillor has a rabid penchant for stereotypes, which he manipulates to his every whim. They are half-baked or just plain unbelievable. the pace of the story is erratic, and the story itself? Well, frankly a yawner. Our protagonist, Larry Keillor, I mean Wyler, is presented to the reader as a feckless, whining oaf who somehow manages to write a best-selling novel and is invited to go write for The New Yorker. How this came about is unimportant...or we have to assume since no time is given to Wyler, the struggling writer. No, instead we are tossed into to a lukewarm marriage (made passionate only by Wyler's prodigious lovemaking skills), are then whisked to Wyler's call from the big city. He then proceeds to leave his wife behind with nary a tear. Once in NY he wastes no time in bedding any woman who crosses his path, and by gum these women do like crossing his path! His brooding self-pity seems to be a vagina-magnet with a 50-yard radius. Wholly nonchalant about leaving his wife, Iris, Larry's thoughts of her are fleeting at best. Iris even makes a surprise visit to NY, and nearly catches him in bed with the lover du jour. Of course when he all but admits his indiscretions, how do you think his strong-willed wife responds? Right, she coos and asks him to make love to her. Wyler is not believable as a writer either. The piece his boss, Shawn has in his pocket on the golf course, the piece "written for Snede", is so bad that I find it inconceivable its author would have been hired at The New Yorker. His predictable writer's block is handled poorly, too, both by Wyler and Keillor. Wyler handles it with maudlin pouting and drinking; Keillor by padding whole chapters of the novel. Both should have just gotten down to the business of writing. Love Me comes across as nothing more than the author's plea to be embraced beyond the bucolic midwest town, which has served him more than well.
Rating: 
Summary: Keillor is an American treasure
Review: Keillor in his fifties knows first hand the struggles with the meaning of life, alcohol, silly sex, and why marriage is good for you. Larry Wyler's wife, Iris, does just fine, thank you very much, without Larry, but Larry spirals out of control without her steadying influence. And within this story is the wonderful satire of inside The New Yorker magazine, where all the famous writers display exactly opposite personalities of how they were in real life. This sly book hides its serious core of midwestern values with hilarity and satire. "Love Me" is Keillor's best book so far. Unlike Larry Wyler, Keillor's alter ego in this book whose writing regressed in quality and quantity, Keillor's seems to just get better. I giggled out loud reading this book. Garrison never hits you over the head with with obvious humor. If you slow down and read every word your attention is rewarded with puns, call backs, oddities and intelligent humor. This is a delightful book. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Democratic Propaganda
Review: Keillor should consider using his talent and energy running for office or trying to change all that he gripes about rather than spending most of his time taking potshots-for-profit at Republicans.
Rating:
Summary: Humorous, but not a must read
Review: Love Me is funny at times, but also very depressing. It's plot is simply not exciting. I would recommend this book if you are looking for a light read, but not if you want to read a novel with any depth.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book is A "Scream"
Review: Loved it and give it four stars instead of 3 because it made me laugh out loud at times. A quirky story that I could just hear being narrated by the author in my head.
Rating:
Summary: Can't Understand Why Everyone Doesn't Love 'Love Me'
Review: Reading these other 12 reviews, I am disappointed in the reaction to this brilliant book. Granted, if you're already a Keillor fan, you're in heaven as you read the lines and hear Garrison's voice insinuate the pauses and hesitations, the stuttering and comic inflections, that make his radio show a 25-year enduring icon of compassionate comedy. His theme is a bit odd -- a young writer dreaming of one day joining the New Yorker fulfills that dream, only to be beset by the Mafia, a "can't live with it, can't live without it" marriage, and terminal writer's block. Within the story is another story, that of the protagonist as lonely hearts editor. The letters he receives, and the replies he sends, are hysterical, odd, and clever. Don't overanalyze the humor and hyperscrutinize the plot. This is just plain funny stuff, with the occasional poignant and touching revelation about what it means to be a human wrestling with one's devil of an ego. It's vintage Keillor, and vintage fun.
Rating:
Summary: Like it -- a little
Review: Reading this book reminded me of sitting through a meeting of my son's Boy Scout troop (average age 13). There are a lot of dumb jokes, distressing attitudes and oh, my, such a fear of appearing even a little grown-up.
Still, it's hard not to like a book that makes a bonfire of the recent spate of sanctimonious old-New Yorker memoirs. Keillor's bizarro-world editor William Shawn is the antonym of the plaster saint of shy mannerliness his former magazine colleagues depict. This Shawn is a two-fisted-drinking, powerboat-driving, Hemingwayesque he-man -- worth a look, despite the silly Mafia subplot that's apparently meant to score off the real-life, Italian-surnamed publisher of the New Yorker at the time of its takeover by a magazine conglomerate.
"Love Me" is a ragbag of material Keillor seems not to have had the energy to develop further. There's a scene or so from his brief marriage to a Danish woman, samples of the recurring Mr. Blue advice column Keillor actually wrote for Salon magazine and a lot of bleep-on-your-background humor that echoes "Prairie Home Companion" sketches. If you lose your place, it doesn't matter much -- except in a few spots where some kind of honest feeling comes through.
There's a part near the end in which the narrator reflects on the value of a long marriage and the destructiveness of adultery. Why search the world for the perfect tuna sandwich, he asks, when your wife makes a good tuna sandwich? Reductive, and a bit nasty, sure, but this is Keillor giving a serious subject his best try. In the context of a story about an interrupted marriage, with a dedication to the author's late first wife, it's touching. That said, the author is then so embarrassed, he ends the book by giving his character an amnesiac illness, played for uneasy laughs.
I hope someday Keillor feels able to write his memoirs. I'm reminded of a time I heard an interviewer ask this plummy-voiced radio personality to "say something in" his native Minnesota accent. Keillor refused, for no particular reason I can remember. Maybe he could get it back, at least in print, for a more forthright book about his life. That would be a story readers really could love.
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