The Pleasure of My Company

Steve Martin can write.

Lots of people can, of course, and comedians (the good ones, anyway) must write. Words are the heart, the soul, the very lifeblood of most comedians -- excluding, of course, the slapstick/prop comics like Carrot Top and Gallagher and George W. Bush.

Few performers, though, after creating a particular stage persona (to hilarious result) can then create an entirely different (and equally effective) film ouevre. Rarer by far is the artist who can then write in a still different (and still wonderfully literate) voice.

Steve Martin can write.

Creating a novella like "The Pleasure of My Company" is a task that, in most hands, would be fraught with peril. Written in the first person, it is the account of a man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Daniel is so dysfunctionally obsessed that he can't ride in a car; can't even step off a curb. This limits his world to the destinations to which he he can walk -- further, it limits his world to only those destinations to which he can walk by crossing the street at lined-up driveways (thus avoiding curbs). This, for all intents and purposes, limits his world to the Rite-Aid and the Kinko's (at which he occasionally must touch every corner of every copy machine in order to impose order upon the inherent chaos of the universe). Daniel recognizes the absurdity of such actions even while being imprisoned by them. One would (wrongly, as it turns out) assume that such a protagonist and novel would be, at the very least, off-putting.

Daniel's lives in a world of gentle fantasy (he assumes, for example, that when his Mensa test is returned, they had dropped a digit off the I.Q. score); yet his ironic self-perception (he knows he is not "normal") makes him more endearing than pathetic.

Daniel doesn't so much do things as have things happen to him (he wins a prize as "Most Average American" (and then revels in the irony that an insane man (using his own self-description) might be the most average)); he can't hold down a job, but then receives a huge inheritance from his grandmother. He falls in love with women he hasn't yet actually met (his first love is a real estate agent that he observes from his apartment window; his second is his student-therapist). For all of this, he is remarkably likeable. There is pleasure in his company, and in the end, the reader discovers that there is beauty in the quiet heart. "The Pleasure of My Company" is, as the title implies, not so much about the plot as it is about the calm joy one gets when among friends.

"The Pleasure of My Company" is a lovely book with its own quiet heart, and when its (all too brief!) story is told, I found myself missing Daniel and his wryly accurate observations on the noisier (and just as insane) world surrounding him.