Steve Martin gets serious

Shopgirl

By Steve Martin
Orion, 163 pages
Available at Powerbooks

By all appearances, nothing could be lighter than Shopgirl, a slim little novella written by comedian/art collector/writer Steve Martin in 2000. The title promises something breezy about consumer habits in Beverly Hills. Its undaunting length poses no trouble to lunchtime readers or the office crowd. Even the cover – a shopping bag rendered in soft pastels – announces that this is a light, refreshing mint of a book.

But appearances can be deceiving. Martin is a social satirist, or more precisely, one who punctures social conventions with a dry, needling wit, and Shopgirl – his first novel – is full of pinpricks.

It’s also awfully sad in its way, as it airlessly skewers LA lifestyles, hovering above the narcissistic pursuit of The Good Life like a droll traffic reporter. Martin writes well, as always, and even convinces us of his affection for Mirabelle, the shopgirl of the title who (occasionally) sells ladies’ gloves at Neiman’s, an exclusive store in LA. His eye for detail is precise, and the miniaturist quality of his observation reminds you of a 19th-century European novelist deposited on the West Coast of Now. Think Jane Austen with a Neiman’s credit card.

We meet Mirabelle on the first page, poised at her glove station, "leaning against the glass with one leg cocked behind her and her arms splayed outward, resting on her palms against the countertop." We all know the pose: the bored yet graceful posture of a ladies’ department girl. Martin imbues the image with a studied sadness which reminds you of an Edward Hopper painting.

For you see, Mirabelle is not like other LA shopgirls, injected with collagen and silicone and on the prowl. No, she is simple and natural, a girl from Vermont who occasionally sells her drawings to local galleries. She meets two men who couldn’t be more different, but who are both attracted to her for the same reason: her simple, guileless beauty. Jeremy is a slacker who stencils logos on amplifiers; they meet in a laundromat and have what passes for a date in LA. Mr. Ray Porter is an older Seattle businessman who buys a pair of gloves from her at Neiman’s, then sends them to her home as a gift, along with an invite to dinner. Like a lot of characters in Martin’s Los Angeles, he is searching for something, or in the process of becoming something else. Here he ruminates about Mirabelle after their first date:

Upon reflection, he cannot tell if the surface he glimpsed under Mirabelle’s blouse was her skin or a flesh-colored nylon underthing. He gets in bed, and instead of letting the streams of data pour through his mind, he lets the symbols of sex form their own strict logic. The white blouse implies the skin which implies the bra which implies her breasts which implies her neck and her hair. This leads to her stomach which necessarily invokes her abdomen which leads to her inner thigh which leads to her panties. This access leads to further access and implies taste and aroma and a unification of his self made possible by the possession of his very opposite. This logical sequence is plotted against a series of intermittent days that spread over several months. The entire formula is a function of whether the square inch in question is skin or nylon, and if it is nylon, what then is the true texture of the square inch hidden beneath it?

Before you conclude that Shopgirl is more Marcel Proust than Cruel Shoes, don’t worry: Martin is still a funny observer, and he uses the short length of this novel to tweak LA’s cult of youth and beauty, self-help gurus, the art gallery/dating scene, and even psychoanalysis. From the flawless salesgirls at the cosmetics counter ("When they are in motion, these perfume nymphs look breezy and alive, but when they are still, their faces become vacuous and frozen, like the Easter Island of the Barbie Dolls") to the mechanics of sex ("Occasionally, the cat jumps on the bed and bats at Jeremy’s testicles as if they were hanging balls of catnip, causing a disastrous delay in the action"), Martin’s wit abounds.

But his favorite subject is human behavior, something that is not confined to LA or the Beverly Hills dating scene. He manages to render Mirabelle, Ray Porter, and (to a lesser extent) Jeremy in tiny, shaded strokes that elicit laughs, if not pangs of recognition. Here is Jeremy, post-coitus:

Then a terrible thing happens. Jeremy uncoils himself from Mirabelle, stands in his underwear at the foot of the bed, and begins to talk. More than talk. Orate. And worse, he talks in a way that requires Mirabelle to respond with periodic uh-huhs. What he talks about is a range of topics loosely categorized under the heading Jeremy. He talks about Jeremy’s hopes and dreams, his likes and dislikes, and, unfortunately, a lot about amplifiers.

In the old days, comedian Martin had a tendency to overdo the sarcasm. His essays and movie performances revealed a man who held his subject (and his audience) at a safe distance, wrapping his goofy wit behind a thin veil of contempt. A collector of art in real life, he seemed too cultured to enjoy the simple things he lampooned. But Shopgirl escapes this trap by employing a gentle humor, a kind of omniscient older person’s wistfulness which pokes fun at LA but still holds it in the palm of his hand. His performance as a host at the 2000 Oscars revealed a more human, self-deprecating side, and Shopgirl suggests that Martin might, in fact, have a real fondness for his subject.

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I will be signing copies of my books Kano-nization and The Way Things Work today from 4:30 to 7 p.m. at the ongoing Philippine Bookfair, held in Megatrade Hall, 5th Level, Megamall. You can find me at Tradewinds Books, booth 33, unless I’m off somewhere browsing.