I like a book that makes me chuckle. Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company did just that. I had been seeing his name on the best seller lists, and decided to see what I could check out from the library. First I checked out Shop Girl, but that one did not hold my interest. The Pleasure of My Company definitely did. It is filled with irony, yet also with much sweetness. It is written in first person from the point of view of a 31-year-old man who is a prisoner of his own neurotic obsessions. A neighbor in his apartment building, while the two are jogging, helps him to see that he can break free from one of those obsessions.
Our main character becomes the caretaker of the toddler son of his therapist, who is a graduate student in psychology, and he decides he wants to leave this child free of the constrictions he has erected in his own life. A woman, to whom he has long been attracted, who is a pharmacist who fills his prescriptions at Rite Aid, sees how sweet and kind he is to the toddler, and she becomes attracted to him, too. She has a great sense of humor, and divides his obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious. He decides to make the most of one of his obsessions, silent counting and alphabetizing, and becomes gainfully employed at Hewlet Packard.
The book has a very happy ending, which I won't ruin with this review.
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