The Wonder Spot

Melissa Bank gives the lie to the old belief that Americans are devoid of wit and irony, the two great duelling weapons of British intellectual life.

Ill-served by its dust jacket (as was her previous book The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing), The Wonder Spot is actually a bright and dazzling collection of eight linked short stories about the life of Sophie Applebaum.

As a girl she reluctantly attends a cousin's bat mitzvah, and is then persuaded to take Hebrew classes in preparation for her own - which she skips to smoke cigarettes with a girl who has always spurned her at school. At college her roommate Venice talks her into buying the 'perfect dress'. A long stint of living with her brothers in Manhattan while learning to type eventually leads to a publishing job, which she does her best to lose. Writing advertising copy for baby wipes proves similarly unexciting.

Although Sophie lives what could be described as a 'normal' young person's life in New York - searching for the right job, the right apartment and the right partner - Bank has transcended this ordinariness by making her quick, sympathetic and likeable. She is self-deprecating, sharpwitted, and kind, patient with her family (whose expectations she gently confounds) yet uncertain about her relationships with men. She also pinpoints with beautiful accuracy the shortcomings of those she doesn't much care for.

This is a gentle, easygoing book that manages to be very funny and quietly touching as well. Bank is a generous author who fills her books with enough wit to power a Dorothy Parker convention.