Beach books: When it’s too hot for Tolstoy

The beach book is easily digestible, designed to be guzzled down from a cramped airline seat or reclining poolside chair.  Comforting, happy endings are assured; every couple who ought to end up walking into the sunset together does (although the best of the genre have you doubting that destiny in the middle chapters.)  They’re not the novels you proudly display on your shelves so that guests may marvel at your intellectual prowess, but frankly, it’s too hot out for Tolstoy.

Many of this year’s selections feature the “chick-lit” leading lady, the archetype of whom is Helen Fielding’s discombobulated Bridget Jones.  She is often jilted, obsessed with personal grooming, disastrous at entertaining, and drinks a lot of Diet Coke in her disorderly house while avoiding phone calls from her meddlesome mother. (Indeed, one novel opens with the protagonist’s friend mowed down by a speeding car while crossing the street on a Diet Coke run.) 

A couple of books diverge from this pattern, resembling a more classic “woman’s novel” in the Anne Tyler mode: lots of scenes set in kitchens, some unfulfilled longing, and a bit of meditating upon one’s blessings.

Let the mental vacation begin!

Plastic fantastic
Amy Borkowsky’s accountant once advised her never to throw away a credit-card bill.  For that we owe him a debt of gratitude, for without this directive Borkowsky would never have squirreled away the source material for “Statements: True Tales of Life, Love and Credit Card Bills” (Chamberlain Bros., $20, to be published in July).  This delightful pseudo-memoir is drawn from the author’s personal financial archeology — a dozen years’ worth of American Express receipts that thoroughly chronicle her life as a single Manhattanite.

Some incidents are embarrassingly familiar: misread relationship signals lead to an optimistic Victoria’s Secret purchase, returned 10 days later in ignominious defeat.  Some are so outrageous you want to dismiss them as fiction, such as when she and a friend hatch a plan to meet wealthy bachelors in the Concorde lounge at the airport; they fake an emergency right before boarding in order to have their $5000 tickets refunded.  Yet even when Borkowsky is phoning the president of Kenner demanding to know who has an Easy-Bake oven still in stock, none of it comes across as precious, self-conscious wackiness.  She somehow manages to convey that the stunts are the result of logical decision making, up to and including writing a crank letter to Tom Jones asking for the return of a pair of panties “thrown onto the stage in error.”

Brevity is the soul of wit, often proven when a single line-item from AmEx is the freestanding punchline.  When her boyfriend insists he can find her a carbide chuck drill for “20 or 30 bucks, tops,” Borkowsky wordlessly follows his earnest promise with the telltale receipt: “Kips Bay, hardware, $118.89.”  The brief, punchy chapters are the M&Ms of the memoir world — you can set them aside at any time, but you’ll probably gorge yourself on the whole bag at once.

Hitting the ‘Spot’
Melissa Bank’s second novel, “The Wonder Spot” (Viking, $25) is the literary analogue to the film “Lost in Translation.”  Readers will either complain that “nothing happens” or marvel at how much of the human condition can be imbued in her sparing paragraphs and unadorned comic prose.

In a family of three flourishing kids, Sophie’s the closest to being a black sheep: cutting Hebrew class, rankling at the prospect of a bat mitzvah.  Her college is second-rate, and upon graduation, she has no real idea what she might like to do.  She spends a summer couch-surfing between relatives, haltingly teaching herself to type from a long-overdue library book.  Stymied for other ideas, she cribs a career from a sample resumé and goes into publishing, where a co-worker observes, “You lack artifice.”  She treads water through her twenties, running through a handful of professions, succeeding at none.

Reading the novel is like leafing through Sophie's scrapbook while she sits alongside, providing jocular color commentary, illuminating the contrast between the observable surface of her life and what played out within.  To be Sophie is to feel that everyone else is privy to some essential knowledge about how to be human which you alone must learn by trial and error.  Her voice is inveterately honest; she has an acute awareness of her own failings but is not an apologist for them, inviting you to laugh with and at her simultaneously.

Sophie eventually falls in love with Matthew because he is “inaccessible” and later with Bobby because he is both dangerous and outright rude.  Although her string of fractured relationships with fractured men features prominently, Sophie’s story is not about the quest for love, but for an authentic self.

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