Melissa Bank has written a book about one the most boring Jews on the Eastern seaboard. Sophie Applebaum, Bank’s leading lady in “The Wonder Spot,” isn’t just a yawn. She’s a failed portrayal of the urban, sexually uninhibited, secular woman.
Bank has created a character with the emotional depth of a puddle.
Clearly, this wasn’t her intention. One of chick lit’s early-bird (and more successful) writers, Bank strives to write about ordinary, “normal” young women.
And “The Wonder Spot” is, after all, being marketed as an easy beach read. It is an easy read — meaning there aren’t big words or big ideas to trip over.
But it hardly qualifies as summer smut either. “The Wonder Spot” is a PG-rated letdown. There’s more sex in a “Friends” episode than in over 300 pages of this chick lit. At the end of the day when Applebaum crawls into bed with her lover, the reader is left in the dark.
Sophie Applebaum spends the first 15 years of her adult life in New York City. Without focus, she drags from job to job, climbing an unappealing ladder from an editorial assistant to a junk mail copywriter. She spends time with her two brothers, one who is an artist with a hunger for tortured, beautiful women and the other who was once a child genius and is now an Orthodox doctor. Applebaum loses her virginity during a thankless one-night stand and then sleeps her way around New York, one man per chapter.
Told in vignettes, the novel begins at Applebaum’s perfect cousin’s bat mitzvah in Chappaqua, N.Y., where the moody 12-year-old Applebaum spends an hour in the temple parking lot with an older boy. And then she befriends the bad girl at Hebrew School. These adolescent scenes of small defiance lead us to believe that Applebaum may have spine (even if she gets bad grades). And, we could like her.
The problem is once Applebaum hits adulthood her emotional growth is stunted. She lacks reaction or reflection on her position in life as a lost Jew struggling to find her place in the world of editorial jobs and noncommittal men. There’s nothing. Bupkis.
This is where Bank fails: Applebaum’s neither depressed nor accepting. She’s neither sad nor scared nor defiant.
Applebaum on herself: “I’m lazy; I lack discipline; I have no patience. I can’t think of a single skill I’ve mastered or a single talent I have. I barely have a job, let alone a career … I have no grasp of geography; I don’t even really know what physics is. All this contributes to my overall lack of substance.”
Even when she’s at a real low — her father dies and she ends up back at home in Surrey, Penn., interviewing with the campy Jewish newsletter “Shalom”— and then snaps out of her funk, her character doesn’t grow a smidge bit wiser.
The weak moral of Bank’s spoon-fed message is that Applebaum doesn’t need men, a career or artistic pursuits. She’s in love with her city. (Sound familiar “Sex in the City” fans?) The problem is we just don’t believe it. We don’t believe Applebaum loves anything.
“The Wonder Spot” by Melissa Bank (336 pages, Viking Adult, $24.95).