By Nicholos Wethington

Daily Staff Writer

You would think a story about a guy that stays in his apartment most of the time would be boring.

After reading “The Pleasure of My Company,” by Steve Martin, you’d be surprised to find that you are wrong.

Daniel Pecan Cambridge, the hero of the story, is afraid of curbs. He has to have the aggregate wattage of the light bulbs in his apartment equal 1,125. These and other neurotic tendencies force him to stay home, except trips to the Rite Aid to ogle at the pharmacist.

Daniel also admires from afar, and tries to impress, the realtor showing apartments across the street from his. He goes jogging once in loafers, khakis and a dress shirt to impress her, only to make a fool out of himself when he can’t overcome his fear of going off the curb at the end of the block.

Visits from Clarissa, a psychology intern assigned to help Daniel, are the highlights of his week, and he soon starts to have romantic feelings about her.

The women that Daniel admires are not purely what comprise the novel, though. As he starts to go out into the world more — by finding a curbless passage to the mall — and realizes that everyone has their quirks, Daniel becomes more self-confident and self-aware.

Friends like his doltish upstairs neighbor, Brian, whom he’d kept at a distance, begin to have a profound impact on his life, and he begins to reciprocate their friendship and trust in others instead of attempting to simply analyze them as curiosities.

Though there is a goofish, comic element to Daniel’s character, Steve Martin doesn’t use him merely as a device to poke fun at. Through the course of the novel, Daniel’s loneliness and self-doubt endear him as a very real — if slightly quirky — person.

“The Pleasure of My Company” is short but quick-paced. It could be read in one sitting, and you can still be enchanted by Martin’s tender wit and ability to give one character such breadth of humanity. Daniel is fearful at times, but also courageous, and his heart is in the right place, even though he sometimes screws up.

Don’t misunderstand, though, for “The Pleasure of My Company” is not a sappy feel-good novel. Martin sharply comments on how society constructs sanity and on the value we place on love, happiness and outer beauty, forcing readers to laugh at themselves and their own conceptions of the world.

Martin, true to his acting career and other works, is funny and smart, using slapstick comedy and wit that will make you laugh out loud a number of times.

“The Pleasure of My Company” is worth shutting yourself up in your own apartment to read — if you can overcome the curbs, that is, on the way to the bookstore.