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In SHOPGIRL, Steve Martin proved he could write a good, engaging novel. In THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY, Martin proves he can tell a great story!
Daniel Pecan Cambridge wants what everyone wants: love. As the title suggests, Daniel spends a great deal of time alone. He lives out his days almost exclusively in his antiseptic, highly organized Santa Monica apartment. He ventures out only if he can navigate the 8-inch-high curbs he fears and avoid gas station attendants in blue hats. Daniel has obsessive-compulsive disorder.
His search for love fills the book. It sends him to the local Rite Aid via a safe route to ogle Zandy, the young blond behind the counter: "The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth." He dilly-dallies, checking out earplugs and "liquid-filled shoe inserts that claim to prevent varicose veins" while watching Zandy from afar. Killing time he even enters a contest: the Tepperton's Apple Pie Most Average American Essay Contest --- not once, but twice. Once as Daniel Pecan Cambridge and the other time as "Lenny Burns."
The love search also sends him across the street to the polished Elizabeth, a real estate agent dealing with condos in his neighborhood. Daniel is obsessed with her, and fabricates meaningful exchanges out of experiences that are as mundane as passing each other on the street. He asks himself how he should talk to her: "Act like myself," he suggests. And then we peek into the workings of his mind. Rejected by Mensa (a clerical error, he estimates), he ponders the expression "Act like myself." "Let's say my shopping list consists of two items: soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. So here's my point. This question I'm flipping around --- what it means to act like myself --- is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc, and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet we're available in the same store. The store of existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensa's loss." And vividly illustrates Martin's talent.
Elizabeth and Daniel do eventually speak in Daniel's plot to get to know her, but he inflates the significance of their "relationship" in his mind so much so that when he turns his affections elsewhere, Steve Martin, in a beautifully descriptive and funny passage, compares Clarissa (his new object of affection) to Elizabeth: "She reflected light; Elizabeth sucked it up. Clarissa was a sunburst; Elizabeth a moon pie. So now my preoccupation with Elizabeth became a post-occupation as I turned my Cyclops eye onto Clarissa. Yes, I would always love Elizabeth in some way, and one day we would be able to see each other again but it was too soon right now. Better to let her handle her own pain, with her own friends, in her own way. But Elizabeth was at fault here. She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: she met me."
And then love sends Daniel to Texas, to the home of his family, and it's there that we discover the genesis of Daniel's disorder and that he is in fact capable of true unconditional love. It is no wonder that he wins the "Most Average American" contest --- not once, but twice. Despite his debilitating disorder he is the average Joe. And Steve Martin has written a tremendously tender and comic story about being that average Joe who counts ceiling tiles, adds up the household light bulb wattages, and harbors a host of other protective defenses and rituals rendered funny with Martin's clever pen.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
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