Word: shopgirl
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...that Shopgirl (Hyperion; 130 pages; $17.95) isn't also funny. It's full of metaphors that raise wry smiles (a goodbye kiss "so formal it might as well have been wearing a tuxedo") and lots of pert social commentary, especially about a Los Angeles subspecies of sexual predators "whose highest accomplishments are that they were cute in high school." But the author is serious about his glove lady, Mirabelle Buttersfield, and about Ray Porter, the fiftysomething man Mirabelle admits into her solitary life. Once Martin fashioned funny-weird balloon animals; now, at 55, he creates funny-sad, nice...
...funny thing about Steve Martin's first work of extended fiction, Shopgirl, is that it's not funny. At least not the laugh-out-loud-and-frighten-the-horses funny of Martin's early stand-up comedy, or of his performance as the man-woman in All of Me, or the humor pieces in his collection Pure Drivel. Shopgirl, which really is about a 28-year-old woman behind the glove counter at the Neiman Marcus department store in Beverly Hills, offers quieter pleasures: a delicate portrait of people inflicting subtle pain on others and themselves, and an appeal...
...TIME: And the "moral" is often a phrase that appears in the middle of a book and again at the end. For "Shopgirl," the phrase is "It?s pain that changes our lives...
...TIME: With Steve Martin?s name on the dustjacket, some readers will be expecting comedy. Your shorter fiction is laugh-out-loud funny ? as I can testify, by citing complaints from people near me when I?ve read it. "Shopgirl" is different, of course. If you were to tape-record someone reading this book in an otherwise silent room, then play back the tape, what would you hear...
...Martin: No one knows my work better than me. I know every little thing I?ve done. And to me, Shopgirl is a logical conclusion to what I?ve been doing...