Better even than the movie...

I know, shockingly, I'm going to say that a book was better than the movie based on it, but it's just fully the case here.

It's been two weeks since I saw Shopgirl the film version, and it still rings true in my mind, a beautiful, fleeting glimpse into the life of a beautiful young woman and the two men who pursue her.

In the novella, Martin's first foray into serious foction (as opposed to his few plays and collections of essays), Mirabelle is a beautiful glove-saleswoman at Nieman Marcus in Beverly Hills, barely making ends meet and keeping her depression at bay. In the course of the story, she meets and dates (sort of) Jeremy - a slacker character whose - well - character is much more well fleshed out on the written page instead of on the big screen. Mirabelle turns her attentions then to Ray Porter, a wealthy man trying on women instead of doing what he claims to be doing - looking for love.

In the book, the motivations and thought processes of all three main characters are presented in such beautiful, vivid detail by an omniscient narrator who makes only brief appearances in the film version, that I found myself much clearer on why things were happening, why characters did what the did, why feelings were moved aside or felt by each person in the story. We even get some background on Lisa - the rival-in-her-own-head to Mirabelle, the perfume girl who tries to steal Ray Porter away - moving her into a real person instead of the dropped in anachronism that she appears to be in the movie.

The movie was very true to the book - predictably as Martin wrote both - but was simply a telescoped version of the novella, combining details, omitting side stories for the sake of the visual and story flow. The resulting product is a beautiful film that feels like we missed a few details here and there, and had I read the book first, I probably would have been disappointed by the movie. Reversing the directions, however, I found myself amazingly happy with both, as the book adds so much to the story that the movie had left out.

I did listen to the book as read by Martin, and his reading is excellent, capturing the nuances that I assume he intended better than another reader could have. Martin truly is turning into a renaissance man, something that I simply couldn't have predicted based on his early comedy.