BOOKS | The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank | Penguin Random House, 2005.  

The Wonder Spot, 2005.

People think the “sophomore curse” refers to the fact that second efforts in the arts are generally crappier than their premiere predecessors. They’re wrong, of course. It more accurately refers to the fact that that when you put out a bestseller, critics everywhere immediately begin sharpening their claws in anticipation of your second attempt.

Melissa Bank should consider herself so cursed.

While compare-and-contrasts are probably best left to high school English literature students, let’s just get this one thing out of the way: Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot is not quite as good as The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing (Bank’s first book, published in 2000). It feels like a little more of the same and is just not quite as compelling or original as its big sister.

Still, I think I love this book.

Sophie, heroine of The Wonder Spot, is a traditional every-girl. I expect critics might want to compare her to Bridget Jones, but they shouldn’t. To relegate Bank’s novels to the realm of so-called chick-lit is more than a little unfair. (And frankly, the term chick-lit is unfair and offensive in general, including when talking about a book like Bridget Jones’s Diary, but I digress.)

Yes, The Wonder Spot is far more likely to appeal to women than men, but that’s only because men (in general) are closed-minded babies who constantly purport to want to “understand women” yet aren’t interested in doing the bare minimum to even begin to do so.

Beyond that, Bank’s writing is much more insightful than that of so many of the pink-covered paperbacks it’s being shelved with. Any chapter could easily appear in The New Yorker (as much of Bank’s work has), and were a traditionally male author’s name to appear alongside, no one would bat an eye.

Melissa Bank has an uncanny ability to write short stories and link them into a cohesive and effortless-feeling whole.

Unfortunately, this may be because she keeps writing the same character. Sophie is more than strongly reminiscent of Jane Rosenal of Girl’s Guide. In fact, Jane and Sophie are basically interchangeable and as such, The Wonder Spot reads alternately like a continuation of the other book, or an alternate reality. I think Bank must be aware of this. The folks at Penguin certainly are. Even the covers are similar.

The bottom line is that if you’ve never read a book by Melissa Bank, you should consider it, and if you already like The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, you’ll like The Wonder Spot too. Maybe not as much, but it is not really fair to compare.

A version of this “The Wonder Spot review” appeared in my regular book column for Dose, published June 20, 2005. Clipping shown below. More stuff about books and authors is here.

2018: I still love both The Wonder Spot and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

I love the New-York-iness of them, because it doesn’t feel forced (as so many books inexplicably set in that city do), and the way they make me feel both nostalgic for and cringingly embarrassed by my younger self. Mostly I love that they read real. I just believe everything Melissa Bank has to say. Her writing feels deeply honest to me, even if it’s all 100% fiction.

Another thing: I’ve re-read both books several times over the course of the last 15 years and tired of neither of them. I wish Melissa Bank would write another, but she’s not particularly prolific. I read somewhere that she’d suffered a brain injury at some point (a cycling or car accident, I believe, but I could be remembering this wrong), and I’m sure that slowed her down considerably. Then again, some people just write more slowly than others. I think I also read that Girls’ Guide  took her 12 years.

Take me for example: I’m a verbal diarrhea expert.

If you’ve perused the site at all, I’m sure that came through. I can vomit out a lot of text, but refinement (at least of my own work) isn’t my strong suit. Bank’s writing is the polar opposite, and sometimes I think that’s what I like best about it. It’s spare, calculated, and preternaturally precise. I hate that because she is a woman, and because women populate her stories, she is relegated to the realm of the unserious. She remains, even today, such an excellent illustration of how fucked up and unfair the publishing landscape is.

Bank’s books are explicitly (or necessarily even implicitly) feminist. It’s not about that. They’re just good. And there is a masculine quality to the writing, at least in terms of style (which is to say, it ticks all those ‘boys club of editors’ style points boxes) that I think would go over like gangbusters if the author were a man. Since she isn’t, Bank’s books are largely ignored, and it just leaves me a little depressed when I find myself thinking about it. Anyway!

Published in Dose, June 20, 2005.