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    Shopgirl
    Shopgirl
    Shopgirl
    Audiobook3 hours

    Shopgirl

    Written by Steve Martin

    Narrated by Steve Martin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    THE BESTSELLING NOVEL BY STEVE MARTIN
    IS NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
    Mirabelle is the "shopgirl" of the title, a young woman, beautiful in a wallflowerish kind of way, who works behind the glove counter at Neiman Marcus "selling things that nobody buys anymore..."
    Mirabelle captures the attention of Ray Porter, a wealthy businessman almost twice her age. As they tentatively embark on a relationship, they struggle to decipher the language of love--with consequences that are both comic and heartbreaking. Filled with the kind of witty, discerning observations that have brought Steve Martin critical success, Shopgirl is a work of disarming tenderness.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 1, 2000
    ISBN9780743563789
    Shopgirl
    Author

    Steve Martin

    Steve Martin is one of today's most talented performers. He has had huge success as a film actor, with such credits as Cheaper by the Dozen, Father of the Bride, Roxanne, Parenthood, L.A. Story, and many others. He has won Emmys for his television writing and two Grammys for his comedy albums. In addition to his bestselling novel The Pleasure of My Company and a collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, he has also written a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for Shopgirl

    3.5/5

    1,470 ratings64 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved this ending. This is my favorite movie of all time. I love the chemistry between Steve Martin and his characters!
    • 4/5
      Cute and charming. Kept reliving the movie in my head.
    • 4/5
      I recently watched L.A. Story, and thought to myself, "holy mackerel. This Steve Martin fellow can write." So that's how Shopgirl ended up in my library queue.At times blunt, and at others lyrical, this is a sparse and bittersweet novella about an affair between Ray, a 50-something divorced millionaire, and Mirabelle, the titular 20-something shopgirl. If you're looking for typical "chick lit" (and I dislike that term, but it is what it is), go elsewhere.I've noticed other reviewers object to this book, calling it (or the author) misogynistic because of the way Martin writes the Ray/Mirabelle relationship, or Mirabelle herself and the other female characters. (Given the character of Lisa, they have a point.) But my view is this -- a good writer creates characters that have their own internal logic, a weird honesty that doesn't preclude the fact that they may be lying (intentionally or un-) to themselves or their partners, or abusing one another's trust (again, intentionally or un-). Good novels have truths in them, waiting to be unearthed by the reader: truths about relationships, human nature, society, whatever you bring to the book. In this respect, Shopgirl was a treasure trove, at least for me.Favorite sentence: "Mirabelle's mind floats in space, and the five fingers that pull her toward him are received into her heart like a psalm."
    • 2/5
      Shopgirl by Steve Martin - OK (on reflection, disappointing)

      Really not sure about this book. Not even sure where I found it - could have been an unregistered one from Hemma. When I saw it was by Steve Martin I thought it would be worth a shot. It's also just a novella and as I'm awaiting a bookray, I needed a quick read.

      This is written in the third person and I really didn't like that. I'm not sure where all the acclaim on the back comes from, reading it I had high hopes - very disappointed.

      Anyway, the shopgirl is question is Mirabelle and she works on the glove counter at Neiman's. Beverley Hills. As no one really buys gloves anymore, she's not exactly busy and this allows her to day dream and the freedom to work on her art in the evenings. The story documents her troubled love life, but doesn't really go anywhere.

      Yeah, disappointing would be a better verdict than OK.

    • 1/5
      Charming, but the charm wears thin quickly when it becomes clear that Martin is far more interested in and capable of charm than he is of writing characters and plot into a novel. The book attempts to cover this up with frank, sudden descriptions of characters' interest in sex.

      Overall, dull and lifeless with quickly waning charm - which is nice for the first 20 pages or so.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this little teeny tiny book.
    • 5/5
      This is a charming, insightful little tale - with a happy ending. Very nice, Steve Martin!
    • 2/5
      I picked this up as a “quickie” on my way out of the public library. It was on a shelf right beside the checkout counter. Who has time for 1500 pages when your child is sick, chores need to be done, and work sucks seven and a half hours out of your day, every day? I opted for the short novella. It wasn’t tough to get through, but it was tough to independently imagine, considering I had already watched the movie, and inadvertently kept seeing Steve Martin and Claire Danes as the main characters. Unfair.

      I aspired to be impressed by the idea that an actor could also indeed write. Unfortunately, I believe my expectations were too high. I have nothing against Steve Martin, and I admire his attempt at putting words to paper, even concocting a storyline of love. Where the characters had potential at being interesting, the narrative unfortunately “told” me, what I should have been left to infer. Though the author kept proclaiming the female protagonist’s complexity, I thought she was too dim-witted to have allowed herself to be de-valued by a man. And I lost patience with the immaturity and self-absorption of the male character. Where I had hoped for an evolution in the relationship, its inevitable bust was neither disappointing, nor surprising. I suspect there was supposed to be a larger comment hidden within the context of the work. I guess. But you’d have to read hard to get the point about loneliness, desperation, the intermingling of two strangers trying each other on, and somehow in their resistance to self-awareness and the risk of substantial and lasting love, they could do nothing better, but realize their loss—but of course, only too late. Okay.

      But then again, I knew it was going to be a quickie. And it sure was. Shop on and pass “Shop Girl” by.

    • 4/5
      This little book surprised me: Martin's style, the perceptive nuances of his characters. Lots of emotion in a small package!
    • 5/5
      ..."it's pain that changes our lives."

      Let me try to type this correctly:

      Men are pigs and ruin women's lives...
      but, women can be just as bad as trying to ruin women's lives.
    • 4/5
      A touching glimpse at a sweet but doomed relationship. A slice of love life.
    • 5/5
      Pretty much the same as the movie...so much so that I was never able to not imagine Claire Danes, Steve Martin, and Jason Schwartzman. Even though they were all great in their roles, I wish I would have read this first. The "Lisa" chapter almost made me cry. Oh, women. Oh, men. Oh, relationships. Oh, sugar daddies.
    • 4/5
      I know this book has mixed reviews, but I really enjoyed it. I found it sweet and affecting and well written. The characters, (well, at least Mirabelle and Ray) were strangely real to me, even though neither of them was particularly engaging. Jeremy was pretty thinly drawn, but not really a huge part of the book. All in all, a nice little book.
    • 4/5
      This is my second read of this novella. I liked it, and can see why I put it aside to re-read...event though it took me many years! The story is, on one level, a simple one: a young woman sells gloves, which no one buys, and is an aspiring artist. There are two men in her life and she will end up with one of them. But there's more here. There is an exploration of relationships with brutal honesty, there are characters who are simultaneously sure of what they are doing and totally confused. This short book sparked a lot of thought about the nature of friendship. I haven't seen the movie and worry that the deeper aspects may not come through on the screen.
    • 4/5
      A sweet little summer read. Steve Martin strings together a lovely handful of moments and insights, but seems to run out of stamina and ties it all together too quickly at the end.

      Mirabelle is the shopgirl of the title: a former art student now barely eking out a living at the glove department of Nieman's in Los Angeles. The love triangle formed by Mirabelle, amp-stenciler Jeremy, and millionaire Ray Porter would seem to be the focus of the story, but really it's all about Mirabelle. Martin has uncanny insight into the inner world of a twenty-something woman trying to allow herself to deserve real love. Perhaps closer to home for the author is Mr. Porter, a man who strings along a series of girlfriends as he keeps his heart in reserve for the "real" love of his life, and therefore cannot meet her. All three characters learn and grow from their encounters, but with a few unsatisfying short cuts toward the end.

      Like a slinky Prada gown, the prose is beautiful, but the structure leaves some coverage lacking.
    • 4/5
      I fairly enjoyed this book. It follows a young woman who works behind the glove counter at Neiman Marcus. She has a brief affair with a person her own age but it seems to be going nowhere. Then she meets a much older man who gives her pretty much everything she could want. As much as it tries to be a love story between these two it just never seems to happen. In the end she becomes reacquainted with the younger man closer to her age who it seems has gone through a complete transformation.
    • 2/5
      I picked this up as a “quickie” on my way out of the public library. It was on a shelf right beside the checkout counter. Who has time for 1500 pages when your child is sick, chores need to be done, and work sucks seven and a half hours out of your day, every day? I opted for the short novella. It wasn’t tough to get through, but it was tough to independently imagine, considering I had already watched the movie, and inadvertently kept seeing Steve Martin and Claire Danes as the main characters. Unfair.

      I aspired to be impressed by the idea that an actor could also indeed write. Unfortunately, I believe my expectations were too high. I have nothing against Steve Martin, and I admire his attempt at putting words to paper, even concocting a storyline of love. Where the characters had potential at being interesting, the narrative unfortunately “told” me, what I should have been left to infer. Though the author kept proclaiming the female protagonist’s complexity, I thought she was too dim-witted to have allowed herself to be de-valued by a man. And I lost patience with the immaturity and self-absorption of the male character. Where I had hoped for an evolution in the relationship, its inevitable bust was neither disappointing, nor surprising. I suspect there was supposed to be a larger comment hidden within the context of the work. I guess. But you’d have to read hard to get the point about loneliness, desperation, the intermingling of two strangers trying each other on, and somehow in their resistance to self-awareness and the risk of substantial and lasting love, they could do nothing better, but realize their loss—but of course, only too late. Okay.

      But then again, I knew it was going to be a quickie. And it sure was. Shop on and pass “Shop Girl” by.

    • 4/5
      Steve Martin's got a talent for writing.
    • 4/5
      It's confirmed. I have a bit of a crush on Steve Martin.

      Sensory descriptions like this make me weak in the knees:...the various scents that have been sprayed throughout the day onto waiting customers have collected into strata in the department store air. So Mirabelle, at five-six, always smells Chanel number 5, while someone at five-two is always treated to the heavier Chanel number 19. I love that I can almost visualize the strata, and I immediately imagine walking through that store with girlfriends of different heights and each of us thinking that the store smells like something different.

      Mirabelle (played by Claire Danes in the movie, which is coming up on my Netflix queue as soon as I catch up on Downton Abbey) is a salesgirl in the nearly deserted gloves department of an upscale department store in souther California. Shopgirl is primarily the story of Mirabelle and two men: one a slacker type (played by Jason Schwartzman) with whom Mirabelle becomes passively involved, the other an older and wealthier businessman (played by Martin himself) with whom Mirabelle finds herself in an unexpectedly deep relationship. The former is described thusly: He never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile. This kind of pithy insight into his characters' emotions is one of Martin's great strengths as a writer.

      You know how sometimes you look up from a book, or work, or a good conversation, and realize it's gotten dark outside without you realizing it? In other words, a dramatic change has occurred, but so gradually that you can't pinpoint when it happened. I felt that way about the unfolding of the characters' personalities; by the end of the book I felt that I fiercely understood Mirablle, but I can't point to a specific moment when I began to understand her motivations. As a whole, though, I thoroughly enjoyed the characters' journey, though at times it seemed largely a passive one.

      I withheld a star because of the ending. Whereas the rest of this novella was marked by the slow, quiet progress of three characters' lives, the last several pages were composed of clipped summaries that spanned months and years in just a few short paragraphs. It felt rushed and abridged after the patient pace of the rest of the book, and left me feeling disappointed and unsatisfied. Still, I liked the rest of it so much that I recommend Shopgirl rather highly if you're in need of a short book that is mostly sweet but has a thread of melancholy. But if you have time for something longer, pick up Martin's An Object of Beauty instead.
    • 1/5
      I wish I had made a note of why I entered this title on my Wish List to Read. From the moment the writing provided on page 13, "She drives in the same posture as she walks, overly erect. The glasses give her a librarian quality-before libraries were on CD-ROM-and the '89 Toyota truck she drives indicates a librarian's salary too." Really?
      I'm a former librarian. I don't appreciate this description especially in a book with a copyright date of 2000 and by an individual that I consider to be educated and have global awareness on a large subject base.
      I continued reading and finished the book but I certainly wasn't riveted to the storyline. I would not recommend this book and I find it difficult to understand why The New York Post said, "Shopgirl is a small triumph."
      I understand this book became a "Major Motion Picture" starring Steve Martin. I generally like Steve Martin movies but I think I'll skip this one.
    • 3/5
      Read this a LONG time ago. Since it was Steve Martin, I wanted it to be funnier.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book and read it very quickly. (For me, at least. I like to savor my books. I do enough on a timeline for work.) Unlike other reviews I've read here, I didn't find the book incredibly gender stereotyped. It annoyed me far less than Bridget Jones' Diary, for example.

      Perhaps some of my sympathy from Mirabelle comes from the fact that I am married to a man who is dysthymic, and mood ups and downs and medication changes are all par for the course and sometimes extremely difficult. Perhaps some of my sympathy comes from the fact that I had moved to LA for graduate school around the same age and had similarly lonely times as a result. I enjoyed the realism and messiness of feelings and understandings and relationships.

      I was really riveted by the use of the omniscient narrative voice here, and I didn't miss dialog or feel that I was being told; rather, the narrative voice was a distinct character in itself, and the book would have been missing a great deal in a more conventional narrative.

      Interesting story well told.
    • 3/5
      I picked up Shopgirl at the Strand for $4.95. I had heard of it vaguely as the movie with Steven Martin in it as an adaptation of the book Steve Martin wrote. I purchased it as a book that I could take with me on vacation and have it be ultimately disposable. Sometimes this trick backfires on me as I end up really liking a book and toting it home with me regardless of my original intentions. This is not one of those times.

      Shopgirl tells the story of depressed, artist Mirabelle who works behind the glove counter at Neimann Marcus. She has few friends, doesn’t do much with her art, and is basically wafting through life trying not to get mired in depression. Enter Ray Porter (the Steve Martin character), a 50 year old man also drifting through life, searching for the perfect woman by running through all of the imperfect ones as fast as he can. The two embark on a relationship which predictably ends badly, but also predictably teaches both of them something about themselves and allows them to grow as people and friends.

      I didn’t have super high hopes for this book at the outset, having seen another example of Steve Martin’s writing in the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile (a play which starts in a very promising manner and ends with an Elvis impersonator beaming down into a small French café in Monmartre. Really.) Surprisingly, this book is relatively well written and even contains some witty insights on relationships between people. Here are two examples of such passages:

      … Jeremy does have one outstanding quality. He likes her. And this quality in a person makes them infinitely interesting to the person who is being liked. (p8)

      “I am traveling too much right now,” he says. In this sentence, he serves notice that he would like to come into town, sleep with her, and leave. Mirabelle believe that he is expressing frustration at having to leave town and that he is trying to cut down on traveling. … So now they have had the Conversation. What neither of them understands is that these conversations are meaningless. They are meaningless to the sayer and they meaningless to the hearer. The sayer believes they are heard and the hearer believe that they are never said. (p64-65)

      That being said, I couldn’t get past the fact that this book is essentially chick lit. It might be semi-good chick lit (if that isn’t an oxymoron), and it may have been written by a man, but it’s chick-lit nevertheless. It has all of the hallmarks of chick-lit with a little bit of Paulo Coelho style self-discovery – no wonder it was a NYT best seller. I can’t recommend it without reservation, but if you want a short book for a quick plane/train ride, it would certainly do the job.
    • 4/5
      Steve Martin's use of language has always fascinated me. Even in his days of comedy he could twist the language and make it mean something one had never thought of before. In Shopgirl, his mastery of language illustrates the awkwardness, the spaces, the flaws of his characters while engaging us in an interesting story. It's the observations about the world around them, rather than the characters' observations which make this book so fun to read.
    • 4/5
      Well, glancing down at the last review when I started writing this, I see I like this more than that reviewer did. Why? Firstly, it's concise - to me, a virtue. Secondly, it's pretty tough on the very human trait of self-delusion without being too censorious. The only people it doesn't really spare are those who see relationships from an unashamedly predatory viewpoint. Thirdly, as you'd expect, it's funny. Though undeniably a male take on relationships and motivation, it's a fairly nuanced one, albeit delivered more as commentary than narrative. Seeing the film adaption afterwards, I felt it works better as a novella. Despite the brevity, there's more depth to it. Would I have read it if it wasn't by Steve Martin? Probably not, as my motivation was to see how well he'd write fiction.
    • 5/5
      Steve Martin is a favorite of mine. He can make me laugh any day. Let him show up in one of my dreams and well, that'll make my day. In fact, he made a guest appearance in one of my dreams just the other day. I crack myself up that way.Anyway, this IS that Steve Martin: comedian, actor, banjo-player-extraordinaire. This novella isn't a laugh a minute. It's a thoughtful foray into the mind of 28 year old Mirabelle who works the glove counter at Neiman's in California. Her story is that of her meeting Jeremy who is childish and selfish and hasn't a clue about women...and also meeting Ray Porter who is a self-possessed businessman whose only selfishness is his bachelorhood and the fact that he chooses to keep Mirabelle just outside the boundaries of his heart. There is also a film by the same title. I am eager to view it. I have to say that part of what I found so very enjoyable about this book is the fact that I could hear Martin's voice telling me the story. Music to my ears; I find his voice dreamy. This would be the perfect beach book, in my opinion. Too bad I wasn't on a beach this past month!
    • 4/5
      He never uses a lot of dialogue which I usually find somewhat frustrating. But he just writes the most beautifully constructed sentences. Lots of smart, dry humor. I loved this book.
    • 5/5
      Nice little story of a rich computer guy and a Nordstrom's salesgirl.
    • 4/5
      Mirabelle is a glove saleslady at Neimans. She is young and immature, looking for love in all the wrong places. She meets Jeremy is is more immature than she, and then she meets wealthy Ray Porter, who is much older than she. He wines and dines her, but does not provide the love and security she craves.
    • 4/5
      "She moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranded in the vast openness of L.A. She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near misses is starting to overwhelm her. What Mirabelle needs is some omniscient voice to illuminate and spotlight her, and to inform everyone that this one has value, this one over here, the one sitting in the bar by herself, and then to find her counterpart and bring him to her."Shopgirl offers a glimpse into the mismanaged lives of Mirabelle, Jeremy, and Ray Porter. Mirabelle, a self-proclaimed artist, is depressed, medicated, and lonely. She's 28 and works the glove counter at Neiman Marcus. On very rare occasions she draws; her artwork is stunning and bleak. She worries. Mirabelle moved out to L.A. to find her self.Jeremy is 26 and stencils logos onto amplifiers for a living. He sees this as art. Jeremy has no ambitions and absolutely no clue. Today is all that matters to Jeremy. He meets Mirabelle at the laundromat and they have a short and awkward courtship.Ray Porter is a recently divorce millionaire and is nearly twice as old as Mirabelle. He's a genius and socially sophisticated, he's also terribly self-absorbed. He is intently looking although he's not certain what he's looking for. Ray Porter is kind and vulgar. He takes more than a passing interest in Mirabelle.This novella is subtle. Steve Martin uses his trademark dry humor to make the isolation and incompetence of these characters not only palatable, but enjoyable. Ray Porter's coarse language and near adolescent sexuality makes an oddly appropriate paring to Mirabelle's insularity. Jeremy's eventual metamorphosis sets the tone for a book that is, ultimately, about growing up. Captivating.