Shopgirl

Steve Martin

Here's the thing about this book: Martin breaks full-force one of the most essential rules of good fiction writing: "show, don't tell." Martin as the narrator of this book 'tells' you, the reader, everything. He tells you what each character is doing, and why they're doing it. He tells you what each character is feeling, what those feeling mean, what each character is thinking, the consequences of that thinking, and the faultiness of the thinking. He doesn't leave much of anything for the reader to discover on his own. And yet, the story works surpisingly well. But now I know why this book is so short. You can't keep up that kind of style for 300 or 400 pages. It would completely fall apart. But 130 pages is short enough for Martin to pull this off successfully. I really enjoyed it.