So I've been hearing great things about Shopgirl, the new movie starring Steve Martin and Claire Daines. It's based on Martin's novel, which I read and enjoyed, about an older man who falls for a younger woman. It's more complicated than that -- or rather, it's just as complicated as that, which makes it more complicated than the simplistic treatment most books and movies give that subject.
I haven't seen the movie. But I've heard some really nice reviews about Steve Martin's subtle, nuanced performance of the well-off suitor. And for a few weeks now, I've been trying to reconcile this in my head with the character I remember for them book -- a neurotic, agoraphobic guy who had tics that make Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets seem like the man in the gray flannel suit.
And then it hit me -- I'm thinking of the main character of The Pleasure of My Company, the novel Martin wrote after Shopgirl. I listened to both on audio, Martin read them both, and they blended in my head. Both of them are good reading, but the two leads couldn't be more different.
What a weird movie I was expecting.
Rob
Monday, November 14, 2005
It Finally Clicks
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Have you ever read a book, then a year or more later read the same book and not realized it was the same book for a frighteningly long time? I did this with The Stone Diaries. The second time around I was like, huh, another book set in rural Manitoba. Must be the trendy new setting, like New Orleans or San Francisco.
Now I write down the names of books I've read. Life's too short to read about rural Manitoba more than once.
As a matter of fact, I have! I did that with... oh hell. Looks like I'm doomed to read it three times.
I just remembered, sort of -- I think it was "Eight Million Ways to Die" by one of my favorite mystery writers, Leonard Block. And I know I've done it with at least one of Ed Mcbain's 87th Precinct novels.
You mean Lawrence Block? He wrote a really good book on writing called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit.
Yep -- that's him. He also wrote Writing the Novel, which I like a lot, too. (I was concentrating so much on making sure I distinguished him from Robert Bloch that I threw Elmore Leonard into the mix!)
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