Steve Martin: The Pleasure of my Company

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN


If ever there was a case of needing to disassociate one's knowledge of the author from the work at hand, this intelligent and curious offering by the famous American comedian would most definitely fit the bill.

Fortunately, Steve Martin's brilliant creation, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, lodges himself so firmly in your imagination that you fully engage with the character, and quickly resolve any preconception you may have about the author's "other job".

Daniel is a character who cannot cross the street unless there are two "scooped out" driveways directly opposite each other, he is a man who wonders how he can be in love with someone whose name has no anagram, he is someone who, on a trip from Santa Monica to Texas to settle his grandmother's estate decides that the only way he can cling to his deeply embedded neuroses is to speak in sentences that don't contain the letter 'e'. So instead of saying - "Let's get on the road early," he says, "It's a long trip for us. I want our roads to know not much traffic," explaining to his bewildered companion that he is "talking Navajo".

This companion is Clarissa (no anagram possible) and her son Teddy. Daniel is a study for Clarissa's psychology degree; she is free care for him provided by the state. She is one of a few women in his life, who include Zandy at the local drug store, Elizabeth the realtor and Granny, who sends cheques that keep Daniel going, because of his inability to work.

He had been a code writer at Hewlett Packard, but found that he could no longer "allow myself to create code when I knew all along that its ultimate end was to be decoded". Uh-huh.

And so Martin teases us. Sometimes Daniel's antics border on psychotic, sometimes on autism, often on altruism. He seems at times unbelievably perceptive, at others resoundingly silly.

The whole book is a fascinating ramble through Daniel's imagination, is hilarious, sad, and brilliantly written, all in one. I found it occasionally too intense and had to take a breath or two, and then a great turn of phrase would lure me back for more.

Yes, there are echoes of Jack Nicholson's Melvin Udall from As Good As It Gets - the neuroses, the weirdo who sees life differently because a child enters his milieu and so on - but that doesn't stop this being a deeply imaginative, self-aware but not smug novel, from someone who is starting to build up a literary body of work that one feels bound to tag "impressive". Surprise of the year.

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicholson