Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
I Am Not Steve Martin
By Elaine Blair
Out of My Skin
by John Haskell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 211 pp., $14.00 (paper)
John Haskell's new novel has what seems a comic premise. A man meets and courts a woman while pretending to be the comedian Steve Martin. Pretending is perhaps the wrong word; Jack, the narrator, is not assuming a fraudulent identity, but simply imagining, when he goes on dates, that he is Steve Martin. His impersonation is so discreet that most of his interlocutors don't know that he's doing it. Jack pretends to be Steve Martin because it makes him feel less self-conscious and inhibited in social situations. He has little interest in Martin himself—he barely knows his work—but is inspired by a professional Steve Martin impersonator, Scott, whom he gets to know in the course of writing an article on celebrity impersonators.
Review, 3438 words
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