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Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary) read the book, assumed Ray was Steve and, says Martin, told him, "You're a little rough on yourself." Martin denies that Shopgirl is any kind of autobiography; it's a mixture of observation and research. "A lot of people think that celebrities are isolated," he says. "But the truth is that every minute of their lives is as melodramatic as every minute of everybody else's. So you can extrapolate from your own experience into almost anything. The emotions are no different."
Shopgirl is subtitled A Novella--an old-fashioned word that itself wears gloves. Martin, so effortlessly hip he doesn't mind seeming square, happily accedes to the word. "'Old-fashioned' runs through this book," he says. "Mirabelle is slightly out of it, out of the center. She's not a dynamic heroine. A heroine has to act, and she doesn't, which made her infinitely more interesting to me than an exciting, vibrant girl."
This is literature to be read alone, curled up in the palm of an easy chair, with a Satie or Sade CD purring on the stereo. The book is like one of Mirabelle's sketches: small, deft, pensive, poignant--a moving still life. Martin doesn't see it's becoming a movie, "because the meaning isn't in the characters' actions. It lives within the sentences. This format was the only way to tell this story."
This slim mint of semisweet romantic fiction is eons removed from his last long work, the screenplay for Bowfinger--a comic celebration of show-biz community. Yet he doesn't see the book as an aberration, or even a detour. "No one knows my work better than me," he says. "I know every little thing I've done. And to me, Shopgirl is a logical conclusion to what I've been doing."
Martin hasn't renounced the comic persona he has suavely hewn for three decades: the genial buffoon too full of himself to realize he's a failure. "I'm actually trying to write a book in that voice," he says. That would be a daunting stunt, like juggling a chainsaw, a watermelon and an audience's impatience. But here Martin has pulled off a task even more difficult: bringing two people to life in the laboratory of language.