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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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The
Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Progressive I
never read Melissa Bank’s 1999 novel, Girl’s
Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which some critics hailed as raising the
bar for Chick Lit. I decided to read her new novel, The
Wonder Spot, to see if the acclaim continues and to try to see if I could
enjoy chick lit. Bank presents protagonist Sophie Applebaum
at various stages of her life in The
Wonder Spot, and Sophie gradually becomes an appealing character, and one
for whom relationships can be daunting. The pace at which Bank reveals Sophie’s
family, the men in her life, and her struggles with becoming who she is, may frustrate some readers, but I found Bank pitch
perfect in revealing this character and her struggles with delicacy. Here’s
an excerpt from the college years, featuring Sophie’s roommate, from the beginning of the chapter titled,
“The Toy Bar,” pp. 53-59: Venice Lambourne was famous the way a beautiful girl can
be in a small circle of places and parties, but hardly anyone knew her. Knockout
was the word people used to describe I
met Venice
didn’t arrive until the night before classes started, hours after the last
parents had kissed their freshman sons and daughters good-bye and gotten into
station wagons headed homeward for Darien, Connecticut, or Katonah, New York,
or, in my parents’ case, Surrey, Pennsylvania. She
knocked on what at that moment became our door and walked into what still
felt to me like my room. She
was very thin and very tall—five foot ten in flat shoes. She almost always
wore flats, one pair until they wore out, and then she’d get another. She
didn’t have many things—not many clothes or many possessions, either; she
believed in owning only perfect things, or, as she said, “one perfect thing.” Her hair was blond and straight, and
she tucked it behind her ears; she had blue eyes that you noticed partly
because her brows were so dark and thick. She said, “I’m Venice Lambourne,” and when she shook my hand her formality
unnerved me so much that I answered as I’d been instructed to as a child:
“How do you do?” Then I said, “I’m Sophie. Applebaum.” She told me that she’d been traveling
and was exhausted; she’d come all the way from I hadn’t heard of “Wow,” I said, and then suggested that
maybe she wanted to check in with our resident adviser, a button-nosed teddy
bear named Betsy, who’d been worried. This When I told her about the soda machine
in the basement, she turned and looked at me as though I was the last and
possibly the longest leg of her trip. She’d passed a bar that she said was
close and open. “Those might be its only virtues,” she said, “but they are
the only virtues I care about at the moment.” I hesitated; with the lack of
self-knowledge I’d exhibit for years to come, I’d signed up for an eight
o’clock class. I told her that the bar was called the
Pines, and it was the college bar, basically the only bar, but fine; I was
hoping that if I talked long enough she’d realize how tired she was. She raised her thick eyebrows, asking
why I was talking about a bar we should be walking to, and I said, “I have an
eight o’clock class.” She said, “I don’t even know what I’m
taking,” and won. It took her about thirty seconds to get
ready. She didn’t change her clothes—a robin’s-egg-blue boatneck,
white capris, and black flats, each a perfect
thing—and didn’t wear makeup, herself a perfect
thing. All she did was wash her face. As we were leaving the room, she noticed
my fiddle in its case. “Do you play the violin?” “I fiddle,” I said, and I felt the way
I sometimes had when I was little and needed to defend my younger brother
from someone older than both of us and hoped I could. Sort of jokey,
she said, “Will you fiddle for me some time?” “Probably not,” I said. The Pines was packed. We worked our way
up to the bar, where we stood drinkless, waiting
for one of the busy bartenders. Standing there, I said aloud what I’d been
noticing all weekend: “Does everyone seem unusually good-looking to you?” She looked around. “No.” I thought maybe her no was
retaliation for my probably not. I said, “The reason I said I wouldn’t
play my fiddle for you. . . I
don’t really play for anyone.” “Why not?” I didn’t want to tell her that I wasn’t
good enough to play for anyone, so I made my face look like I was pondering
the question until one of the bartenders came over to us. He was an older guy
who turned out to be the owner. “What can I get you girls?” “Hello,” The man’s expression didn’t change. “I’ve been traveling all day,” she told
him, “so I need something really, really good.” All around us other student drinkers
were waiting to order. She said, “What kind of red wine do you
have?” But right away, she said, “No,” and again, “No.” “Cassis?” she said to
herself. “Campan?” As far as I knew, she was
naming towns that surrounded She brightened: Something fruity might
revive her—a piña colada, maybe, or a daiquiri. Did he use fresh fruit? He
didn’t. “Maybe bourbon,” she said. Could he
make a mint julep? He knew his customer now and said, “I
don’t have mint.” “No mint,” she repeated, but she agreed
to it, with a sigh, as though she was to face many deprivations here that had
been previously unknown to her. I asked for a White Russian, the drink
I’d ordered at bars on the She looked at me like we’d been
disagreeing and now she suddenly saw my point. “Two,” she said, and the
bartender spilled out the bourbon he’d already poured into a glass. I paid for our drinks—she said she’d
used up her dollars on the cab and had only francs and lira—and while I was
waiting for my change, I noticed one guy looking in our direction. He said
something to the guys he was with, and they looked over, too. We’d barely sat down when one of them
came over to us. “Hi,” he said. He was cute and, like so
many students at “Hi,” I said. He asked if we were freshmen, and I
said we were, and I might as well have said, You can kiss me if you want
to. Then Venice jumped in, introducing both
of us, and I understood that she was being efficient rather than friendly,
and he did, too; introducing himself, he seemed slightly crestfallen. Once she’d learned his name, she used
it: “Tad,” she said and told him how tired she was and that she’d been
traveling all day and would he please forgive her?—she was incapable of
conversation. “Sure,” he said. “Absolutely.” But he didn’t go, maybe because his
crowd of friends was watching. He said, “Where are you coming from?” She looked at him for a long moment, a
reprimand, before saying, “ His “wow” had more bravado in it than
mine, but I could tell he was a fellow untraveler
when he immediately turned the conversation back to the world he knew: “Where
are you living?” “Nice,”
he said. “Bancroft is nice.” She
looked away from him to me, a signal to resume our conversation. He was
looking at me, too, now, for help. It was hard for me not to give it to him,
but I could see that this was between them, and my role was auxiliary—I was
the nurse and she was the doctor; I was the nanny and she the mother. “Well,”
he said. She
said, “It was nice to meet you, Tad.” “Likewise,”
he said. I
felt bad for him when he walked away and said, “He seemed kind of nice.” But
when she opened her eyes, her face was dreamy instead of sleepy. Almost to herself, she said, “This morning I was in It
was after one when we got back to Bancroft. We undressed with our backs to
each other, and I noticed that hers was evenly brown from her shoulders to
her underpants—no hint of where a bathing suit top might’ve been, and I
wondered if she’d just pulled the straps down and unhooked the back or if
she’d gone without. We
were in our beds when I looked over and saw that all that separated her from
the mattress was a beach towel. She was using shirts for a blanket. I said,
“You want a sheet or something?” “I’m
fine,” she said. “Thanks.” She explained that she’d mailed her bedclothes
from No,
I didn’t, and it kept me from offering her my top sheet and bedspread. We
said good night, and I turned off my light. In
the dark, though, it occurred to me that she was probably the only freshman
whose parents hadn’t brought her to school. I wondered if that bothered her.
I wondered if her parents were having too much fun in I
turned the light back on, and we made her bed. I had only one pillow but two
cases, and I offered to stuff the spare with socks. Her
voice was smaller than it had been and apologetic when she said, “Do you mind
if I sleep with your husband?” I
stared at her. It took me a minute to realize that she meant my reading
pillow—it was corduroy with arms—and as I handed it to her, I said, “Did you
make that up?” She
said, “That’s what it’s called.” It
would be another year before I told her that at that moment I’d thought she
was a split-personalitied nymphomaniac. After that,
out of nowhere, she’d sometimes put on a twisted, sexed-up voice and say, “Do
you mind if I sleep with your husband?” I
turned off the light again, and we said good night, but then she was saying
my name—not addressing me, but musing. “Sophie. It’s a pretty name,” she
said. “I
was named after my great-grandmother,” I said. She
said, “It’s old-fashioned,” which was what I hated about my name. “You don’t
hear it too often.” “What
about yours?” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I meant. She
said, “I was named for the place of my conception,” and it sounded like she was
claiming that the city had been named for her. But
then she said, “I’m lucky they didn’t name me Gondola. Or Canal,” and I went
all the way from hating to liking her, and the distance made me feel like I
loved her. Those
first weeks, But
there were nights when she’d say, “Let’s not go,” and she’d act like we were
cutting a class. Usually
we stayed in to watch a movie on television, a movie she said I absolutely
needed to see—12 Angry Men, The Shop Around the Corner, The Best Years of
Our Lives. We’d go down to the basement TV lounge and turn off all the
lights. It would be dark except for the TV and the red of the soda machine
and its everlasting NO CHANGE
light. I
loved all of the movies she did, and The Heiress so much that I forgot
all about Her
favorite came at the end of the movie: Years after standing Catherine up on
the night they’re supposed to elope, Morris comes back, and he’s knocking and
then pounding on her door, and she says to her servant, “Bar the door,
Maria.” “‘Bar
the door, Maria,’” In
her closet, She’d
talk to me about a book she’d read for a class—she kept up with her reading,
as I never could—or she’d mention an article from the New York Times, which
she read every day, as no one else did. Or she’d read aloud from a novel she
was crazy about; that fall it was Lolita, and in the winter Anna
Karenina. While some readers may prefer more
continuity than the vignettes of The
Wonder Spot provides, I found the sampling of episodes in Sophie’s life
to be a fine way of coming to know her character. Steve Hopkins,
July 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Wonder Spot.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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