Funny man Steve Martin turns to writing

By Julie Veinot

Standing in front of the local bookstore's new release shelf, I noticed a thin silver book. The plain cover attracted me so I looked at the first paragraph, then at the book jacket to see the author's biography.

To my surprise, I was looking at a familiar face, one I saw in movies like Father of the Bride and Bowfinger.

I was even more surprised Steve Martin would write a novel about a single 28-year-old woman who sells gloves at Neiman Marcus in Los Angeles. When business is slow, she stares at the silk gloves which "lie on display like pristine, just-caught fish."

Her daily dose of Serzone - an anti-depressant a la Prozac - keeps her from falling into deep depression. For the most part, Mirabelle Buttersfield is an unhappy woman with two friends who remain friends, but not best friends. She carries on a barely lukewarm affair with a slacker who stencils symbols on amplifiers. She also has two cats, one of which she never sees.

Enter Romeo, a businessman twice her age who buys a pair of gloves from Mirabelle and sends them to her, asking her out to a dinner costing hundreds of dollars.

This is Ray Porter. With his open wallet and designer suits, he woos Mirabelle.

Ray is thinking short-term affair - sex, companionship, sex - and Mirabelle is thinking long-term - love, money, love.
This would be one of the central conflicts of the story - a little stereotypical, but with Mirabelle's stagnant love life, it's no surprise she wants to clasp onto this man.

There is a tidy resolution, neither disappointing nor overly dramatic. There are no tragedies in this novel! Cheers to Martin for resolving the novel without resorting to this trick that Danielle Steel uses in most, if not all, of her 50 books.

If you're a dialogue fiend, Shopgirl is not for you since conversation doesn't begin until page 46.

However, if you like to meander through paragraphs of descriptive narration peppered with a few brief conversations, you will meander easily through the book without noticing the lack of dialogue.

I respect a book which is well-written, set in an easy-to-read type, a debut novel which slips into the world of books without too much hype so you get the impression you found a treasure no one else knows about. I also respect Martin for his sense of place and the fact he puts his main character on Serzone and Celexa instead of the over-hyped Prozac.

I may not be a literary guru, but as far as I'm concerned, Steve Martin passes the debut novelist test. Forget he's an actor. You won't believe this book about a glove saleswoman was written by a man, an actor at that. Although the novel wasn't as funny as promised, it is seriously good, with delicious sentences to wrap your eyes around, delicious enough to be read in a few hours.

A winner.