Shopgirl

Shopgirl is a small but perfectly formed novel about a young woman called Mirabelle who works as a shop assistant in the glove department at Nieman's, LA's finest store, and who draws darkly gothic pictures at night. She is adrift in the world and lonely. This is not improved by the fact that hardly anyone buys the kind of gloves that Nieman's sell so she spends most of her day leaning on the counter staring into empty space. There are two men in her life - Jeremy, a man who stencils amplifiers for a living, and Mr Ray Porter, an older man and millionaire who applies logic to relationships, and is serially confused and disappointed. In this exquisitely self-contained novel, Steve Martin touches on the surface horrors of LA - the false noses, lips, breasts and people - without exaggeration or explicitly playing for laughs. It's insightful, dark, funny and tender, particularly when he writes about Mirabelle. By zooming in on a small group and understating his themes (which it has to be said is a big surprise if you think you know Steve Martin) he has produced an incredibly strong piece of fiction.