Dear diary: Here’s another satisfyingly witty heroine

Melissa Bank -- both in her wildly successful “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing” (1999) and now in “The Wonder Spot,” a novel in short stories -- has often been compared to Helen Fielding, the creator of the “Bridget Jones” series. Both authors feature wry, humorous, too-smart-for-their-own-good heroines who use wit to navigate the rocky terrain of careers, friendships and relationships. But whereas reading “Bridget Jones” is like indulging in a carton of your favorite ice cream -- delicious, fun and filling in its own right -- Bank’s work, especially “The Wonder Spot,” is more like a five-course meal: loaded with pleasure and calories, yes, but offering enough protein and complex carbohydrates to satisfy both body and soul.

In “The Wonder Spot,” readers follow Sophie Applebaum from age 12 to her late 30s. Sophie is not a striver, nor even the top dog in her own family; she’s not out for the perfect man or the ideal life. She simply is seeking her own place in the world -- her “wonder spot.” “Boss of the World” introduces readers to the young Sophie, attending her cousin’s bat mitzvah when she’d rather be spending the day at the beach: “My little brother, Robert, was already in the station wagon, reading ‘All About Bats,’ in his irreproachable seersucker suit. Beside him, our standard poodle sat tall and regal.... When my mother tried to coax the dog out of the car, Robert said, ‘He wants to come with us.’

“ ‘The dog will be more comfortable here,’ she said.

“I thought, We’d all be more comfortable here.

“Robert said, ‘Please don’t call Albert “the dog.” ’ “

“The Toy Bar” picks up with Sophie in college, rooming with the gorgeous and well-traveled Venice Lambourne. “She didn’t have many things -- “ Sophie notes of Venice, “not many clothes or many possessions, either; she believed in owning only perfect things, or, as she said, ‘one perfect thing.’ ” Sophie learns about life and men from her roommate, and we can’t help but cheer when an outrageously expensive dress Venice talks Sophie into buying becomes the perfect revenge on the first guy who does Sophie wrong.

Perfection may be all right for someone like Venice, but for the rest of us, the Sophies of the world, good enough is going to have to do. Sophie looks for a job after college with her resume professionally typeset, hoping that “[i]n plain, beautiful type, my lack of experience, accomplishments, and honors came across as understatement and modesty.” Sophie is backed by a very real and fallible family: There’s brother Robert who becomes a doctor and embraces Orthodox Judaism. “[H]e’d been born with his duty gene lodged in the pleasure center of his brain,” Sophie tells us. Jack, her older brother, is so good looking that he can’t maintain a relationship. When her judge father dies early, his absence prompts her mother into an affair with a married man. Sophie’s grandmother, meanwhile, is losing her grip on reality.

Sophie makes her way in the world, faltering, sometimes gracelessly. She establishes a career, first in publishing and then advertising, but never finds outrageous happiness. Throughout, though, her humor keeps us laughing.

At a restaurant, she encounters “a girl so thin she might have faxed herself; her sheaf of friends joined her and folded themselves into the next booth.” At a party, she meets women who are “young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking; they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don’t know they’ll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan.”

Throughout these linked stories, Sophie is painfully self-conscious and uses her razor-sharp wit to help see through the guises of those around her. In “The Wonder Spot,” Bank mixes humor with sadness while leavening difficulty with laughter to create a rich narrative that gratifies on many levels.

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Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.