Melissa Bank: The wonder Spot

Sometimes it's hard not to get nostalgic about fiction writers of yore. Where is the novelist we can press to our foreheads and feel instantly illuminated and amused?
Someone wry and dark like Dorothy Parker, someone wise enough, like John Updike, to know that good writing about sex and love makes a terrific consolation prize for these winter evenings.

There is a writer who fits this bill today and her name is Melissa Bank. Six years ago, Bank kicked off the chick lit boom with her wildly successful story collection, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The book's clever title and winning dust jacket gave the impression of lightness and naughtiness of which there was some. But to lump it in with Bridget Jones' Diary would be a mistake. Bank is a terrific sentence writer, for one, and unlike Fielding she is not afraid of exploring the darker parts of family life: loss and remembrance; change and forgiveness.

These elements are slightly more present in Bank's winning follow-up, The Wonder Spot. Like its predecessor, the book unfolds in a series of chapter-like stories which take place over a period of 25 years. Then the heroine's name was Jane Rosenal; here she becomes Sophie Applebaum, a Jewish woman brought up in Pennsylvania, vacationed on the North Shore of Jersey, and plopped into New York City where she zigzags from one romance to the next, burning off the extended adolescence that has become the birthright of so many college-educated Americans.

The book opens in the early '70s when Sophie is 12 and forced into Hebrew class, and concludes when she has reached 40 and is still looking for a man. What comes in between runs the gamut from high hilarity to deep poignancy — romance covering the former while family life doles out the latter. When she moves to New York, Sophie's younger brother Robert falls in love with a bossy Orthodox woman, creating the first fissure in their family porcelain. Jack, her older brother, gets involved with women and then breaks their hearts.

These events unfold so naturally on the page that reading The Wonder Spot it is easy to wonder how much of this is true. This prurient interest never becomes the driving force, as in, say, some of Salinger's later work. But it does underscore this book's casual, lived-in elegance. Unlike the wildly overpriced dress Sophie buys in one story, Bank's fictional voice never feels faked or heavily mortgaged. And Sophie's sass is playful without being cloying. If all books were this funny TV would be the thing in trouble, not the other way around.

The Wonder Spot will be released next week.
London Viking
$35

* John Freeman is a New York writer.