By
Shaun Clayton
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Writer departs from comedic style, adopts narrative voice
Grade: A
"Saturday Night Live" alums have a tendency to produce dismally unsuccessful projects following their runs on the sketch comedy show. Luckily for the reading public, Steve Martin's debut novella "Shopgirl" is not one of those projects.
The book differs from his previous literary endeavors ("Pure Drivel" and "Cruel Shoes") in that it is not strictly comedic. At the same time, it is not strictly serious either. Instead, "Shopgirl" falls into the rarest of classifications - the "eclectic."
The novella's plot centers around Mirabelle, an art graduate student in her late 20s who works in the glove department at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. The story follows her and her social interactions with three other characters - Jeremy, a slacker who earns money by painting logos on amplifiers, Lisa, her co-worker who uses sex to manipulate men, and Ray Porter, the millionaire in his mid-50s who does not understand women.
Martin uses a narrative style that is the inverse of the playwriting that he has done recently, such as in "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." The text contains few lines of dialogue by the characters. Instead, Martin uses the page for rich, engaging narration.
This narration is used extensively for character descriptions, explaining them to the reader in plain and simple terms- who they are, what they want and what their motivations are. Martin has thus managed to paint characters not in broad strokes, but in fine etchings. Take, for example, this passage about Mirabelle from the section called "Monotony:"
Mirabelle's ambition is about one-tenth of one percent of what would be called normal. She has been at Neiman's almost two years without moving one inch forward. She considers herself an artist first, so her choice of jobs is immaterial. It doesn't matter to her if she is selling gloves or repainting apartments, as her real work is done in the evening with the artist's crayon. Thus she has zero ambition in these day jobs and she tends to leave it to chance when it comes to getting and changing them.
Martin takes a kind of slow, easy approach to the storytelling in "Shopgirl." There are no car chases, no mysterious murders, no sudden revelations about somebody's birthright. He crafts a leisurely plot that does not jar or shake the reader, but simply asks the reader to follow, understand and enjoy the story.
In that sense, Martin has created a story that differs from the norm in that it is not about truly extraordinary people but truly ordinary people. He seems to have placed on his pages characters that could exist, and probably do exist in the average person's life. This presents a great change of pace from the superhuman figures that exist in the thousands of Barnes and Border's throughout the country.
It is not so strange, furthermore, that Martin wrote a book that deviates from standard comedy. Martin originally started his career as a writer, then reached the pinnacle of success as a comedian. Now, it seems, he has settled back on being a writer again.
