Wow, I just really, really didn’t like this book. The more I think about it, the more I just really didn’t like it. There didn’t seem to be a point, and the main characters were all wholly unlikable, but not in a “love to hate them” kind of way. More like, “wait, why am I reading this again?”….
“A girl who is willing to give every ounce of herself to someone, who could never betray her lover, who never suspects maliciousness of anyone, and whose sexuality sleeps in her, waiting to be stirred.” Blech.
The main character is a gorgeous young lady named Mirabelle who works (barely) at Neiman’s selling gloves. She’s an artist, on the side. She’s very pretty, so pretty, and also depressed. Something about this combination strikes the fancy of a very rich older man who I think was named Ray or maybe Roy. Ray is very, very wealthy, which makes up for their 25 or 30 year age gap, and they begin to see each other. Ray has very specific intentions for their relationship (sex, only sex, and fancy gifts), which he intends to relay to Mirabelle but she’s kind of dumb or something and doesn’t understand. Although Ray has tried this fuck buddies thing with other women, too, and they never understood either so maybe it’s Ray.
Oh and there’s this evil vixen trying to break them up, even though there’s nothing to break up.
From here, I figured one of two things would happen. 1) They would end up falling in love, despite their many, many differences (he has a plane! she has a futon! no, for real), and stay together. This would have been dumb, but at least there would have been a point: a love story. Or 2) They would learn from each other, improve themselves and move on. That didn’t happen either–in the end, Mirabelle gets back together with slacker she was kind of sleeping with when she met Ray (he’s a fancy musician now, but still a slacker), while Ray sends her money every once in a while.
And the evil vixen accidentally sleeps with the slacker while trying to hook up with Ray in order to teach Mirabelle a lesson about…leagues, maybe?.
That’s it. That’s basically the whole story. At 130 pages, it alternated between taking forever, and sometimes feeling like maybe Steve Martin got bored and simply stopped writing. Either way, a waste of time. The reviews on Goodsreads range from “Steve Martin is surprisingly adept at prose….A master of the comedic genre…” and “Steve Martin, how I love you….But please, please, please don’t write anything ever again.”. I fall firmly into camp two.