Book Reviews: Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company

Steve Martin is a pretty funny guy. I can't say I'm a big fan of his, but I am familiar with some of his work and know his reputation as a comedian. So when I saw that he writes novellas, I picked them up at Half-Price Books: Shopgirl (which is now a movie) and The Pleasure of My Company. I was expecting a light, funny read. Instead, what I got were devastatingly sad, poignant stories.

In Shopgirl, Mirabelle works at the womens' gloves counter at the local department store. She sells things that nobody wants anymore, and so she stands, day in and day out, waiting for someone to buy something that nobody wants. In a way, this is the theme of the story - Mirabelle is selling things nobody wants; first gloves, then her art, and finally, it seems, nobody wants to, in a sense, "buy" her. She lives a lonely existence, punctuated with "black stretches" of depression.

The Pleasure of My Company stays similar in set up. The story is told in the point of view of Daniel Pecan Cambridge, a young man living in California with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He lives life hedged in by phobias such as stepping off of curbs, trying to interact with the people around him, organizing his life into Sudoku-like Magic Square grids. Slowly, his life changes as he takes the initiative to explore his world around him, one square at a time.

Steve Martin sets up the story in a very casual storytelling tone. There is no fancy diction or turn of phrase, no meandering sentences like this one linked together tenuously with commas and semicolons; it is a matter-of-fact prose setting up Mirabelle's life, and then turning it upside-down as she interacts with Jeremy, the boy in love with her who doesn't want to grow up, and Ray Porter, a wealthy, older man who is looking for a relationship in all the wrong ways. It is the simple thoughts of a man obsessed with repetition, order and some very bizarre compulsions. In both cases, they are horribly imperfect, and yet try their hardest to be normal and live. In other words, they are lot like us.

Despite the fact that one character has depression and the other crippling OCD, both novellas are funny, though The Pleasure of My Company has more laugh out loud moments than Shopgirl. Both deal with very distinct themes - loneliness caused by isolation. They are poignant, genuine and very real. In both cases, the protagonists are surrounded by people - Mirabelle in a department store, Daniel in an apartment full of characters - but both experience an inexplicable loneliness, and both eventually try to break out of it, with varying measures of success.

Steve Martin deals with some very mature ideas in a blisteringly genuine way. Mirabelle is used, from one man to the next, for their own various selfish reasons. Daniel tries to interact with people around him despite his OCD with limited results. But eventually, through a little determination and some dumb luck, they find a way to find themselves and become more part of the world around them. Despite their bleak themes, they end happily, and most satisfying. And thankfully, they are each less than 200 pages, making them mercifully compact in a world of novels that tend to only grow larger and larger in volume as time goes by.

I realize I have been emphasizing the fact that these books can get painfully depressing. But what makes them so is how similar they can mirror certain points in our own lives. Fantastical in plot, yes, but very real in character and emotion. Martin does an incredible job bottling up the emotions in our increasingly connected and yet isolated society and penning them on a page in an economical and touching manner.