Shopgirl has always been one of my favorite novellas of all time. It’s clean, exquisitely written, and feel good without the usual triteness. Lately i revisited it in my memory, out of nowhere, and thought of the way Mirabelle’s identity has been sculpted and managed by a male narrative. That’s something i’ve never noticed before.
As appealing as the novella’s serenity is (specifically, i praised it for being ‘highly cognitive’), it’s not a truthful portrayal of love, of a woman’s path in finding herself. Mirabelle is romanticized, idealized, couched within the framework of acceptable insanity. She is quirky, she is unaccomplished, she is even clinically depressed – but she’s all that without fuss. Mirabelle is quelled by the dominant narrative voice, bolstered and made whimsical by her quietness. We barely know Mirabelle, the real one, with all the tears and neurosis that definitely has to be there.
Like Tom, the ‘regular lunchtime Mirabelle-watcher’ – who ogles at her while we are supplied with an impeccable descriptive piece of Mirabelle’s unassuming sexuality (‘Mirabelle’s legs are slightly ajar, creating a wee wedge of a slight line right up her skirt’) – we have become spectators to the undressing of Mirabelle under Steve Martin’s neat dissection of her as an object of desire.
Ray Porter, protagonist extraordinaire, lonely and sophisticated, romances Mirabelle before becoming generous father figure. It’s indicative of Steve Martin’s own fantasies of philandering guilt-eased by philantrophy, and I’m surprised I didn’t pick it up sooner.
Precisely what I had loved about Shopgirl – its elegant ways, its well of benevolent characters, are its very faults. In my brief re-reading, Mirabelle is more self-effacing than i’d initially remembered. Ray Porter is too much a projected self, and Jeremey’s trajectory of growth much too optimistic. Jaded, maybe? But coffeehouse romance has once more tipped to the scale of 0 in the scoreboard of Good Reads in this Genre.
Q 