Why you should read The Penelopiad and The Pleasure of My Company

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Part of a (possibly aborted) series in which slender, high-end hardbacks based on classical tales or texts were commissioned from well-known authors. Average word count seems to be about 50,000 (the length of a Mills and Boon novelette or intercity train journey) and cover price is £12.99. However, despite this book's quality and appeal to Atwood completists, I doubt Canongate made their money back once they'd spunked most of the budget on hiring Maggie.

Anyhow - for those who don't know much about the classics (me) this is a sparky revisiting of the Odyssey from a female perspective, told in contemporary language by the dead Penelope as she wanders in the asphodel fields of Hades.

There's an amusing running gag about Penelope's jealousy of her beautiful cousin Helen and a real compassion for the women left behind which bleeds through the writing, but it's high-class fluff, essentially, which someone of Atwood's talents can and probably did knock out in a fortnight, and everyone involved knows it. The sort of book you'd give to your mother to make her feel clever. In fact, my mum's getting my copy. And it's not even Christmas.



The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin

Steve Martin is in my good books. Apart from starring in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, still one of the funniest films of the 80s, and film noir spoof/homage Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, he's also the best celebrity novelist I've ever read. Stephen Fry during the period of The Liar and The Hippopotamus is a close second, but loses points for allowing Making History to suck so very, very much. When love comes in at the window, talent flies out of the door, indeed. And The Stars' Tennis Balls was a shit Dumas rip-off with a shit title, too. Although Bookblog found it "intsteresting" (sic). Sort it out, Fry.

Anyway, back to Steve. The first novel of his I read was called Shopgirl - a sensitive, quiet little love triangle story which was about as far from the sort of thing you might expect a Hollywood comedian to pen as it was possible to be. I was really surprised and pleased by it, and in fact had to check that it was the same Steve Martin. It was. Shopgirl's now a film, which
a) I fully intend to watch on DVD
b) gives me hope for a film of The Pleasure of my Company, which would be brilliant, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets Sideways

The hero of The Pleasure of my Company is called Daniel Pecan Cambridge, and he's a thritysomething loner who suffers from something between OCD and Asperger's, to the extent that it takes him forty-five minutes to get to the shop down the road because he can't do kerbs.
There's some back story, there's some love story, there's magic squares and the Most Average American competition, but mostly what I love about this book is the way that Martin inhabits the voice of the narrator. It's completely readable and completely convincing: a Curious Incident for grown-ups. If you can find it, buy it.