Shopgirl by Steve Martin

A few pages into this book I thought to myself "hmmm, this smacks of someone already  famous getting a book deal based on their established famousness." I retain that opinion. 

     

     In the beginning I couldn't decide if the completely saturating pretension was supposed to be satirical. It's not. Except for with Lisa. Who happens to be my favorite character. In a love-to-hate sort of way. All of the characters in this book are incredibly self involved. They treat others as lesser and go along making excuses for why their behavior is justified. Meanwhile Lisa is horrible, quite possibly the most horrible. But she owns it. And there's something to be said for that. 

     The writing comes off as heavy handed. Whenever a clever line or description came up I found myself envisioning Steve Martin at his desk thinking to himself "brilliant! Oh Steve Martin you are a gift to the written word!" But that's probably just me. 

     I also thought the writing was lazy. The ending? What's that about? Not a single bit of it is fleshed out. The same with the Dad's Vietnam bit. It seems like The author got bored and dropped it. 

     I read this for book club. Which explains why I forged ahead despite hating it so hard. A fellow book club member said, "I'm pretty sure Steve Martin wrote this so it could be made into a movie, which he stars in and gets to repeatedly get it on with Claire Danes." Agreed. The book is supposedly semi-autobiographical. Steve Martin is supposed to be the young guy who winds up getting his act together. But we all know he's the insensitive, rich, skeevy old guy. And we know this because all sorts of lame excuses are made for Ray, the old guy. Like, Ray didn't know he was hurting Mirabelle because he didn't know himself well enough. Time to hurry up Ray, you're over 50. As I said, Lame excuses. 

     The excessive use of the F word is more evidence of Lazy writing. Get a thesaurus Steve Martin. It started to remind me of a sociology professor I had in college that would show porn for the shock value and the reputation it earned him as "the cool teacher." 

     There is this to say positively, there were some astute observations of human behavior. Particularly the ease and complexity of miscommunication in relationships. It was clear that the author spent a lot of time thinking on it. I can appreciate that. 

     In conclusion I really hated this book. Which is unfortunate because I enjoy Steve Martin. Though, admittedly, only to a point. If I could give Shopgirl zero stars I would. Just skip it. If you want to read something about human behavior and relationships that is less than 200 pages (and also awesome!) read Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill instead.