Shopgirl
A highly acclaimed L.A. fable by one of Hollywood's greatest comics
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £3.49
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- £3.49
Publisher Description
'A delicate, poignant modern romance about a shy shopgirl' Richard Corliss
Mirabelle Buttersfield spends her days selling expensive evening gloves in Beverly Hills' finest store, and her nights watching television and drawing darkly gothic pictures.
Adrift in the world and lonely, she has few customers, so spends most of her time leaning on the counter staring into space. But then two men enter her life: Jeremy, a roadie for a band, and Mr Ray Porter, a middle-aged millionaire who invites her out to dinner.
Funny, tender, and insightful, Shop Girl is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of LA's false noses and falser people - from one of our best loved comic writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Movie star Martin shone in the comic essays of last year's Pure Drivel--but can he write serious fiction? His debut novella gives fans a chance to find out. Shy, depressed, young, lonely and usually broke, Vermont-bred Mirabelle Butterfield sells gloves at the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus (nobody ever buys); at night, she watches TV with her two cats. Martin's slight plot follows Mirabelle's search for love--or at least romance and companionship--with middle-aged Ray Porter, a womanizing Seattle millionaire who may, or may not, have hidden redeeming qualities. Also in and out of Mirabelle's life are a handful of supporting characters, all of them lonely and alienated, too. There's her father, a dysfunctional Vietnam vet; the laconic, unambitious Jeremy; and Mirabelle's promiscuous, body-obsessed co-worker Lisa. Detractors may call Martin's plot predictable, his characters stereotypes. Admirers may answer that--as in Douglas Coupland--these aren't stereotypes but modern archetypes, whose lives must be streamlined if they are to represent ours. Except for its love-hate relations with L.A., little about this book sounds much like Martin; its anxious, sometimes flat prose style can be affecting or disorienting, and belongs somewhere between Coupland and literary chroniclers of depression like Lydia Davis. Martin's first novel is finally neither a triumph nor a disaster: it's yet another of this intelligent performer's attempts to expand his range, and those who will buy it for the name on the cover could do a lot worse.
