Read the following passage to see if you might enjoy comedian Steve Martin's new novel, The Pleasure of My Company:
"I'd taken [the Mensa] IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90?"
If you laughed out loud (like I did) or even smiled, this book is for you.
This is just an example of the dry, subtle wit that Martin employs in his writing. This kind of humor is also found in his collection of essays, Pure Drivel. Martin has a great handle on calm, unbuilding and character-driven humor, which is why The Pleasure of My Company, while having an extremely tidy happy ending, succeeds so well.
The book focuses on Daniel Pecan Cambridge, a man whose case of obsessive-compulsive disorder is so extreme that he can't even walk from the curb of a sidewalk to a paved road. Instead, he must cross the street by walking from driveway to driveway. However, he is able to lead a life that he feels is normal.
In its 163 pages, this book has little in the form of plot. Frankly, that's the charm of the book: Most of it is simply focused on Cambridge's ruminations, but every so often, a small vignette appears. These side-stories include Cambridge's troubles with a writing contest that has five finalists (he happens to be two of them), a grad student named Clarissa who comes twice a week to examine him unprofessionally and a real estate agent that Cambridge is madly in love with.
Again, the episodic narrative and character-driven aspects of the book charm the reader. For me, this book is most reminiscent of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, which was also a very good movie and starred Hugh Grant. In that book, a loner character is befriended by people who would never come into his life under normal circumstances, including a child.
The only truly likeable character is Cambridge, as he's the only character who rises above marginality. Every other character is given about 10 pages to show off their personalities, or lack thereof. Thus, despite his disease and his overall strangeness, Cambridge is easy to like, because he presents himself as someone who has deluded himself into thinking that he is normal and everyone else is nuts.
Steve Martin has a penchant for writing short; I've seen Shopgirl in bookstores before and have noticed its shortness, and The Pleasure of My Company is equally trim. Although this is a great quality for Martin to exude, for the most part, the end of this book needs about 20 more pages to flesh out its ending. Everything is tied up so quickly, you're almost speechless when the book ends. "Is that all there is?" I found myself asking.
Either way, The Pleasure of My Company is a breeze to read and a true pleasure to enjoy.
Josh Spiegel is an entertainment reporter for the Web Devil. Reach him at joshua.spiegel@asu.edu.
