Shopgirl by Steve Martin

I wonder about Shopgirl. I also wonder about Steve Martin. But I don’t want to digress too much yet. Shopgirl is a novella. It says so, right there on the front cover. It’s kinda like the book is quietly pointing out, “I know. I don’t have a lot of pages. It’s OK. I was written by a famous guy. Who’s been in movies!” i wonder about Shopgirl. DIdn’t I already mention that? I wonder if this was a screenplay firrst or a book… er, novella, first. I mean, it’s a decent story. There’s a young, beautiful, somewhat naive girl working the glove counter at Nieman’s in L.A. She’s an aspiring artist in her twenties. She’s got dreams but no motivation. She’s lost in L.A. but not in a good way. She’s lonely. Her friends are flaky and she has trouble meeting men. She eventually connects with an older, wealthy guy. A business type. He’s not looking for a real relationship, and he makes his intentions pretty clear. But she falls in love with him, anyway. Things go from there. There’s a subplot with another guy, and another subplot with another girl. But that’s really all the details you need about what’s actually on the pages of this lil’ novella. This review doesn’t end here, though.

I’m still wondering about Shopgirl and its author. The story is definitely more fleshed out than a screenplay would be. But the book still kinda reads like one. There’s just enough detail and dialogue in this book to create the necessary scenes. There’a quite a bit of exposition on behalf of the author. I spotted a few lines that were classic Steve Martin. Like, you know, he wrote them so he could eventually speak them? I didn’t know, before I read the novella, that it had already been made into a film. And what do you know? The wealthy, older fellow? With those scant Steve Martin-esque lines? He’s played by Steve Martin!

Please understand me when I say (or type, as this is a blog) that I enjoyed reading Shopgirl. It’s a nice little vignette about adults-who-need-to-grow-up-already. But in the end, it feels like a bit of a vanity project for someone who’d really like to just see one of his personal daydreams (wealthy, older L.A. gentleman sorta seduces young retail clerk, hearts are broken – oh, L.A.!) brought to life. Maybe it was originally rejected as a script, so instead it was made into a book… er, novella. And that gave it enough legs to finally get it into production. Oh, how I wonder.

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