Any Tiffs at Breakfast?

It hardly ever happens that I read a book after seeing the movie. The last one, probably, was From Russia With Love or Dr. No. I have no problem seeing the movie after reading the book, but not the other way around. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because of the time investment: if you know the ending, investing 2 hours in seeing the movie still isn't so bad; spending a week or so reading a book I know whose ending I know - nah.



That might be one reason I haven't seen Breakfast at Tiffany's yet.

We rented Shopgirl some time ago; I had never heard of it, but it starred Clare Danes and Steve Martin, two of my favorite people (for different reasons), and we kind of like small movies. It was okay: entertaining, well acted, unpretentious.

So when a very thin book spine called "Shopgirl Steve Martin" from the Goodwill shelf, I was intrigued, since I had no idea it had been a book before it was a movie.

Well, I was kind of right. The theme seems to be the relation between high and low emotions: Does desire sully love? Is love somehow not as noble if it starts as desire? Can desire change as love enters into it? These are all apt, insightful questions, and Steve Martin addresses them most annoyingly.

He's written a 130 page book of stage directions. Maybe it's worse than that: at times, it seems he's working out the characters' backgrounds, motivations, etc in his mind, except he's writing it down and getting it published: "Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind . . . She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony." Okay, Steve, now you've got your main character straight in your mind - great!

If the TV watching and the romances came up again in the unraveling of the plot, fine. But they don't. And did I mention that the entire book -- every sentence - is written in the present tense? "Carter Dobbs walks her back to Nieman's . . . he gives her his card. . . As he turns away from her, she finally can name what disturbs her about him."

Stage directions.

You do get a nice sense of the characters and their dilemmas. But, if the book had been longer, I probably would have put it down as too annoying to sit through. See the movie -- it's good.

And by the way, Steve Martin may be a bad novelist, but he is still the funniest stand-up comedian of my lifetime.

Speaking of putting down, in the last few months I've given up on Rebecca, and on Ann Beattie's Picturing Will. Plus, Dame Agatha has disappointed me lately (noted elsewhere). So I was starting to fear I was getting an aversion to female writers, until a fotunate thing happened: Goodwill had The Bell Jar. I read the first page and was floored: did Sylvia Plath maintain this level? Can it possibly be this good?