By Breck Longstreth

On Books

Step aside, Steppenwolf. Hello, Sophie Applebaum.

In the past, the bildungsroman — a novel that traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, and social development of the main character from childhood to maturity — was almost exclusively the purview of male authors (Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Marcel Proust) writing about male characters.

These days, fictional heroines like Sophie Applebaum, the protagonist of Melissa Bank’s new book, The Wonder Spot, are taking the place of their tortured male counterparts from an earlier time.

Which is not to say that angst is missing in Sophie’s story. It’s present from the first page of this wonderful novel, when, at age 12, she is forced to attend her cousin Rebecca’s bat mitzvah. “You could tell it was going to be a perfect beach day, maybe the best one all summer, maybe the last one of our vacation, and we were going to spend it at my cousin’s bat mitzvah in Chappaqua, New York.” Piled into the car with her parents and two brothers, Sophie describes the various miseries of family members: “My parents were miserable, probably because they’d agreed not to smoke in the car. Robert was miserable because they were, though he was the reason they weren’t smoking. He was always begging them to quit, and they half pretended they had. I was miserable because we were rushing toward the boredom only a bat mitzvah could bring.”

I’d argue that “The Wonder Spot” falls firmly into the bildungsroman category, and not, as some reviewers have suggested, into the genre of fiction known as “chick lit.” This despite the fact that Bank and Helen Fielding were the two authors most often cited for introducing the world to chick lit, when, in 1999, Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and Bank’s “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing” were published to wide acclaim. Since then, the genre has deteriorated to what Anjula Razdan, in an article (“The Chick Lit Challenge”) in Utne, describes as “those ubiquitous novels with pastel-colored dust jackets bearing whimsically retro images of cocktail glasses, trendy purses, and spiky heels.” Chick lit, says Razdan, “relays breezy tales of spunky professional urban women worrying about their bosses, their weight, their boyfriends, and their Jimmy Choo shoes.”

While “The Wonder Spot” is peopled with professional urban women, boyfriends and bosses, I’d hate to see it dismissed as silly. Bank is a gifted writer who is able to balance breezy with poignant, and who delivers a well-crafted novel with perfect narrative tension. She also has the rare ability to write dialogue that rings so true that the reader feels as if she’s eavesdropping on a real conversation. In one scene, Sophie, a recent college graduate who has not yet landed a job, is forced to live with her grandmother because she can’t afford to pay rent.

“Oh!” she said, pulling up a chair. “What’s his name?”

“Josh,” I said.

“Josh what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Rudman.”

“Jewish?” she said.

I said, “He is Jewish,” though her pleasure in it rankled me?

“What does Josh do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“He’s a poet,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“He writes poetry,” I said. “He’s really good,” though I hadn’t understood any of the poems he’d read to me.

She said, “This is his living?”

I told her that he programmed computers for a research group at Columbia Presbyterian.

“The hospital?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

She thought for a second. “Maybe he’ll decide to go to medical school.”

Ten years later, Sophie is 30-something, and still single. Her protective older brother, Jack, weighs in on her latest boyfriend after meeting him at a party.

Jack says, “That was the guy?”

“That was him.”

Jack shakes his head.

“What?”

“He’s not for you,” he says.

I say, “How do you know?” but what I mean is, How do you know?

“He’s like Ashley Wilkes,” he says. “Any one of these guys is Rhettier than he is.”

Again, I ask my benignly inflected, “How do you know?”

“How do I know?” he says, tackling me into a bear hug. “How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.”

Anyone who cherishes family, who has a daughter, or who is a daughter should love this book. It’s a fast, easy read, but don’t reject it because of that, and don’t expect a Hollywood ending. Bank is too good a writer for that. Her book, and her heroine, like life itself, are complicated and worthy of our attention.

Breck Longstreth is an Island resident, and can be reached at breckonbooks@yahoo.com.

Rating writers: Seattle novelist best of group

Did you ever play that game when you were a child, where you would tell someone they were “hot” or “cold” depending on how close they were to finding the correct answer or the hidden object?

Well, using that scale, I’d like to give mini-reviews of three books: Breath and Bones by Susann Cokal; The History of Love by Nicole Krauss; and Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos.

“Breath and Bones” is Cokal’s second novel. She’s a good storyteller, and her writing’s decent, but she’s let her imagination run a little wild here, and the book suffers for it. We are introduced to the novel’s heroine, Famke Summerfugl, when we see her lying dead, floating in a glass coffin. After that rather dramatic glimpse, Cokal fills in the back-story over the next 400 pages. It’s 1884, and Famke, a tubercular Danish orphan, becomes the muse of an English painter, Albert Castle. When he abandons her, she goes in search of him, traveling to America’s wild west in a picaresque journey that includes prostitutes and polygamists. It was a bit much for me, and I had trouble suspending my disbelief. Rating: cold.

I had great hopes for “The History of Love.” I had read a short story in The New Yorker by Nicole Krauss, and liked it so much that I sought out and bought her new novel. As it turns out, the short story I’d fallen in love with serves as the basis for the book. It’s a tale about love, loss, and the ability of the written word to influence lives.

Leo Gursky and the girl he loves, Alma, grow up in Poland, and are separated when the Germans invade. She goes to America, and later, he follows. But by then she, pregnant with his child and thinking him dead, has married another. Krauss would have done well to flesh out this story and make it her book. Instead, she introduces another set of characters, including a 14-year-old girl, also named Alma. The teen’s story and Leon Gursky’s become intertwined.

I loved the idea of this book, and think Krauss was brave to attempt it. But in trying to tie things together, she introduces too many characters and the reader (at least this reader) gets confused. It’s a task that a seasoned writer like Gabriel Garcia Marquez could handle easily, but Krauss, who is only 31, needs either better editing or more years of writing under her belt to pull off this kind of a book. Rating: warm.

Finally, if you missed Seattle writer Stephanie Kallos’ debut novel a year ago, you’re in luck. “Broken for You” is now available in paperback. “Broken for You” is the story of Margaret Hughes, a seventy-something Seattleite who is diagnosed with a brain tumor. She takes in a young tenant, Wanda Schultz, a stage manager who has come to Seattle to seek the boyfriend who deserted her.

The two women develop a close relationship, and the valuable antique porcelain that fills Hughes’ mansion becomes central to the unfolding of the plot. There’s a little bit of everything here, including echoes from the Holocaust, twists and turns of plot, and a great set of secondary characters. “Broken for You” is reminiscent of an Anne Tyler book, though not quite as polished. I have great hope for Kallos’ future efforts, and think she’s a literary light to watch. Rating: getting very warm; almost hot.

— B.L.