Steve Martin: Shopgirl

By JOHN MccRYSTAL

Steve Martin is best-known as a cinematic funny-man: you'll perhaps remember him from Father of the Bride, or surely for his nose in Roxanne. He has, however, done a bit of writing. He writes for the New Yorker and the New York Times, has published a collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, and a play.

It was hard to know what to expect of this little novel. I think I was expecting something funnier and shallower and was therefore agreeably surprised.

Mirabelle is in her late twenties and works in the glove department of an upmarket Los Angeles department store. She is, understandably, bored and periodically - when whatever happens to be her latest prescription loses its efficacy - depressed. She is in the process of settling, romantically speaking, for Jeremy, who stencils logos on stereo amplifiers for a living, when she is unexpectedly courted by a customer, fifty-something, wealthy businessman Ray Porter. Ray is on the lookout for someone and while he's pretty sure Mirabelle isn't the one, she'll do for now.

The innermost thoughts and desires of the characters are laid bare and their motivations - which more often than not are obscure to the characters themselves - are explained for us. There's a minimum of dialogue. It's a simple, old-fashioned technique which works well.

As the jilted Jeremy reinvents himself, as Mirabelle's beautiful and spitefully malevolent co-worker Lisa seeks to interpose herself between Mirabelle and Ray, and as Ray and Mirabelle's relationship runs its sad course, the picture built up is one of the emptiness of ordinary lives. There are little satisfactions and tiny triumphs; but there is loneliness, and despair casts a shadow.

There are plenty of wry observations, and naturally, the prose is not without its funny moments. My favourite metaphor is where Martin aptly describes the cosmetics department, empty of customers and peopled only by the inert, excessively glamorous assistants, as "the Easter Island of the Barbie Dolls".

Overall, Shopgirl is like the drawings which Mirabelle, in idle moments, executes and occasionally sells: small and dark with their subject - love - gleaming in the middle of the frame.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.

Orion

$27.95