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A Wake-Up Call to the Guy Within
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12120 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
1,773 Words |
| Author
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David Kirby
David Kirby is W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. |
THE BOOK OF GUYS
Garrison Keillor
New York: Viking, 1993
340 pp., $22.00
I admit it--I had forgotten about My Life as a Guy until Garrison Keillor made me look at it unflinchingly with his new collection of humorous sketches.
The Book of Guys will probably have that effect on a lot of readers. These twenty-two sketches, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's, deal in one way or another with that pathetic, self-betraying creature the New Age Man, a neutered, mixed-up version of the stubble-faced, sportsloving moron with a fridge full of beer known simply as "a guy."
If adjectives like "pathetic" and "self-betraying" have a certain choleric bite to them, that is because the Garrison Keillor who wrote this book seems more exasperated here than he does in his earlier writing. Most of these sketches are centered on some poor schmo who used to be a guy once but then became civilized. In fact, most of them forgot they ever were guys. And when you remember that kind of thing, it makes you mad.
Like many of the men who will read this book, I, too, was a guy once. And then something happened. Oh, sure, I grew up and got married, but there's more to it than that. I wanted to be a good husband and good father, but mainly I wanted to be a good person. Like millions of other former guys, I wanted everyone to respect me, including women.
Why bother, asks Keillor? "Men can never be feminists," he says. "Millions have tried and nobody did better than C+." No matter what disguises they don, guys remain guys, and women know it.
Take the matter of monogamy, for example:
A monogamous man is like a bear riding a bicycle: he can be trained to do it but he would rather be in the woods, doing what bears do. Nevertheless, we learn to ride that bicycle for the sake of women, and we ride it darned well, considering, and we live a pleasant, if sometimes cloying, life shopping at the Food Shoppe and Wine `N Stuff and taking the kids to the Wienery-Beanery, attending planning meetings, writing thoughtful letters to the editor, eating bran flakes, supporting the right things, and we accept restrictions and limits, no
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