"But..."
"put them on me!"
Carlo knew all arguments were useless. He knelt down before her and forced the feet into the shoes.
The screams were incredible.
Anna crawled over to the mirror and held her bloody feet up where she could see.
"I like them."
She paid Carlo and crawled out of the store into the street.
Later that day, Carlo was overheard saying to a new customer, "Well, that's every shoe in the place. Unless, of course, you'd like to try the cruel shoes."
What does one do, faced with an entire volume of such curiously written items? You might ask what Martin or anyone else finds funny about them. There's a flat-footed doggedness to the way Martin takes tired jokes and tries to recycle them. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to write a punch-line, and in Cruel Shoes he frequently gets around that simply by reprinting the title of the piece at the end--but this time, in italics. Witness "The Children Called Him Big Nose":
The innocent cruelty of children is something each of us has to face. Their simple honesty sometimes compliments, but more often hurts us. Each person has to accept the verdict of the children, and know that they are right. For example, a friend of ours is known to the children as "big nose." They refer to him in the most casual manner, "Big nose, pass the butter," or "Thank you for the dolly, big nose!" Although he doesn't show it, I think secretly inside he is hurt by it. The adults, of course, tactfully call him "abundant nose," and even young Thomas just out of high school has the courtesy to call him simply, "The Nose."
O, sometimes I wonder why children can't be born with an innate sense of respect. But at least one person has learned something about himself, because the children called him big nose.
The closest approaches to the humorous Martin's eccentric orbit makes are when he delves into scatological jokes. This fertile soil, tilled years ago by satirists as nimble as Jonathan Swift, most often supports the locker room ho-ho's of nine-year-olds and Mel Brooks. Martin could take lessons from them; even his toilet humor festers.
Reading this book can induce paranoia. You'll sit there, turning pages, wondering why you're not laughing, wondering whether it's something wrong with you and not Steve Martin, wondering whether the editors at Putnam have really lost it this time, hoping that the next two-page piece will be a little better.
It won't. Cruel Shoes's degenerative disease is one that reaches the speech centers of the brain before it finally kills off the victim, and the end of the book wanders off into a cloud of incoherent poetry. Whether it's serious stuff or deliberate satire of high-school literary pretense, only Martin and his confessor know. Here's an example:
Several hours later, and quite significantly so we were quiet; again we were quiet, (more than before)
The horror, the horror.
In the end, this book may leave you a little scared. There are people out there who did find it funny, whose patronage has brought it near the pinnacle of the New York Times Bestseller List. You can't know whether they're the harmless people who make Disney World profitable or the types who giggle as they pull wings off dead flies in their basements.