Sophie's choices add up to an oddly small 'Wonder'

June 19, 2005

The Wonder Spot
By Melissa Bank
Viking, 324 pp., $24.95

Beware the young female protagonist with more than 17 boyfriends, I always say. Melissa Bank's wry and often charming ''The Wonder Spot" is poised somewhere between a modern-day comedy of manners and a marathon of tamer ''Sex and the City" episodes, with its hapless heroine stumbling around Manhattan not in Manolo Blahniks, but sneakers -- her spectator pumps for job interviews are stashed in her bag. Sophie Applebaum, newly minted from the Pennsylvania burbs, has a college degree but can only type nine words a minute; she also has a great dad and two protective brothers, but terrible radar for men. In other words, she's like a lot of other young, white, urban women coughed out by pop culture in the past decade, testament to the subgenre of publishing known as ''ChickLit," a category whose name so gives me the willies that I've been loath to use it until the occasion commanded.

Bank had commercial and critical success with her first book, ''The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," a series of interconnected stories that appeared in 1999 on the heels of the ''Bridget Jones" phenomenon. That debut featured a young woman from the Pennsylvania burbs named Jane Rosenal, hilarious at the family dinner table and unlucky in love, smart but trapped in temp jobs in New York, and . . . well, you see the pattern. ''The Wonder Spot" is Jane all over again, but the physician father has become a judge and the jokes are a little more mordant.

The scaffolding for Sophie's Life Unfolding is set up in the first chapter, when she's around 12: After the Applebaum family attends a cousin's bat mitzvah, Sophie announces at dinner that she's decided against having her own. Her eternally understanding father persuades his headstrong daughter to attend Hebrew classes, just to be sure; Sophie concedes, then spends class time smoking in the synagogue bathroom with a bad-girl acquaintance. Thus begins the thematic reach of ''The Wonder Spot": possibility, defiance, compromise. After college (a ''notvery-good school in Klondike, New York"), she tries living with each of her brothers in New York: Robert has an Orthodox fiancee whom Sophie offends by blowing the kosher laws of the kitchen; when she moves into Jack's, she insinuates herself into his fights with his girlfriend. Banished to her grandmother's apartment in the Bronx, Sophie practices her typing and waits for life to begin. By the time she arrives at Steinhardt Publishers on Madison Avenue, she has increased her typing speed, written a scathing review of a romance novel for her potential boss, and honed her attitude, if not her ambition, to match her wit.