The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank
Romantic-comedies being the basic core to chick-literature, it was no wonder that Helen Fielding and Melissa Bank among others were deemed the founding-mothers of chick-lit. In The Wonder Spot, the book after Melissa Bank’s acclaimed debut with The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Bank’s 2005 novel is more literary than what is known these days as chick-literature. It might be for this very reason that many authors began to distance themselves from the chick-lit movement. Once chick-lit became less well-written and more a sub-genre for romance literature, the movement began to lose many of its original writers.
Picking up Bank’s novel where one critic claims, "Bank writes like John Cheever, but funnier," one gets the kind of fiction that fulfills from the first page to the very last. Known for her sparse writing and insightfully funny one-liners, Banks uses a vignette-like story-line to paint a picture very few authors have been able to portray single-handedly. Using the same technique she used in The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, her short prose is like small glimpses into a vastly different experience. Many critics have noted her condensed writing style harkens back to the days of Hemmingway and Carver. Few writers, nonetheless, chick-lit writers, can ever really say they had that kind of critical acclaim.
We first see Bank’s protagonist, Sophie Applebaum, find her way down the road to self-discovery at her cousin’s bar-mitzvah. Frustrated and uncomfortable with whom she is, nonetheless, we see that Sophie has a relentless core to her that, we, as readers, will find irresistible. Confronted with issues from stealing at her Hebrew school to relationship problems with her best friend and then her boss at a publishing house, we track Sophie’s life during the course of her years growing up in New York City and the hazardous affairs we find her in. When Sophie decides to follow her own heart instead of letting her disappointments drain her, she finally gets what she wants and so deserves.
Told in the eyes of a women on the verge of finding herself, The Wonder Spot, is a wonderful novel to take home. Filled with intelligent anecdotes and a vigor, which is lacking in chick-lit these days, readers will find themselves wishing Melissa Bank had gone on writing. Sadly after her second novel, she stopped writing altogether as a protest and confirmation to what chick-lit had become. Readers of chick-lit, after getting the hang of Melissa Bank will wish that the genre would revert back to the days when chick-literature didn’t talk down to women but catered to them in an entertaining as well as intellectual level.