Like Melissa Bank's debut, The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing, her second book, The Wonder Spot, is a novel masquerading as a short-story collection. Again, Bank follows a woman from childhood to adulthood, through a procession of boyfriends, careers, and family crises; again, she avoids any grand sweep of plot, instead letting each story stand as a remote marker on one long and curvy road. It's a compelling way to chart a character's life. As Wonder Spot heroine Sophie Applebaum grows up and comes to terms with being the unambitious misfit in a family of overachievers, Bank's anecdotal style raises questions. Why this moment? How does it add up? And just what does the title mean?
Judging by the story that bears its name, the "wonder spot" is Manhattan, and all of Sophie's romantic travails lead her to understand that she loves the city more than she cares for any guy. But Wonder Spot's eight stories are also about abstract spaces, like the point at which a relationship sours, and the times in a young woman's life when she knows she's supposed to act like an adult but still feels like a kid. In the book's first story, "Boss Of The World," Sophie tries to avoid having a bat mitzvah, but she agrees to attend Hebrew school, where she renews an acquaintance with an elementary-school friend turned junior-high bully, and disappoints one of her favorite teachers by cutting class to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom. All of Wonder Spot's major themes are immediately evident: avoiding responsibility, clinging to childhood, and pinpointing the myriad ways that people let each other down.
At times, Bank loses her way, turning the book into the kind of glib filleting of modern romance that's cluttered up the fiction shelves in the post-Sex And The City/Bridget Jones era. But her prose is always bright and funny, and it's filled with perfectly concise descriptions: a public pool's smell ("chlorine and wet Band-Aids"), a model's body ("so thin she might have faxed herself"), and the younger women at a party ("they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don't know they'll become"). As a character, Sophie Applebaum is a little blank, because she's more a watcher than a doer. In the book's centerpiece stories, "Dena Blumenthal + Bobby Orr Forever" and "The One After You," she watches the people she loves most—former best friends, her mother and brothers, the boys that excite her—drift away with excruciating slowness, lightly repelled by her lack of gravity.