As Steve Martin delves into an increasing variety of media, writing plays, essays, and novellas to go with his comedy and screenplays, he seems to be operating under a curious form of the first law of thermodynamics: As his comedy film roles become increasingly histrionic and unpleasant, his writing gains a compensatory subtle, understated craft. His first novella, 2000's Shopgirl, was a gentle, lyrical fable about two people whose low-key affair let them both re-create and rebuild themselves in minor but crucial ways. His follow-up, the micro-novel The Pleasure Of My Company, is far less poetic but no less tender, and it's drawn along similar lines, in spite of the difference of its approach. Pleasure forsakes Shopgirl's omniscient narration for a first-person look at a man who seems somewhere between autistic and neurotic: He sees curbs as insurmountable barriers, he compulsively subdivides and counts everything from subjective time to ceiling holes, and he must have 1125 watts of illumination in his apartment at all times. Living on government disability, speaking twice a week to a student social worker, and building a fantasy life around the realtor he sometimes sees coming in and out of the apartment complex across the street, Daniel Cambridge is just as hapless and isolated as Shopgirl's protagonist, but far more inclined to unpredictable sentiments like "The next morning I decided to touch every corner of every copying machine at Kinko's." Where whimsical prose and sweeping style made Shopgirl seem as place-specific and yet morally applicable as a fairy tale, Pleasure is comparatively direct, and Martin uses the book's limited perspective to define the minuteness of Daniel's world, while showing how much a minor deviation from the expected can destabilize his internal landscape. Martin is an oddly maternal prose stylist who gently shepherds his nervous, damaged characters through their small epiphanies with what seems like protective affection: For all the seeming precariousness of Daniel's position, he lives in a charmed world where all roads lead up to redemption. His extreme quirkiness and Martin's newfound plainspokenness make Pleasure seem a lot like a Chuck Palahniuk novel without the acid or the stylistic tics and twitches, but the book's confident optimism is refreshing. Unabashedly sweet and sentimental, Pleasure stands in direct opposition to Martin's dry, absurdist comedic writing and his sometimes-spastic film characters. But it shares the talent for observation and the soft-edged humanism that characterizes his best work in all media. Little bits of Martin's deadpan sense of humor occasionally creep into The Pleasure Of My Company, but as welcome as they are, his kindly, poignant serious-writer voice is consistently more compelling.