After following the advice from a manual called "How to Meet and Marry Mr Right", Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise, and never rules. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.
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After following the advice from a manual called "How to Meet and Marry Mr Right", Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise, and never rules. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.
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Packing up some books I came across The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank. I gazed at it in wonder because, as far as I know, it made its way onto my shelves entirely of its own volition. I have no memory of purchasing it, borrowing it, stealing it, or having received it as a gift. Tired from climbing up and down the step ladder, covered with dust, irritable at having to put my books in storage, if only for a while, I looked upon it as a sign, a message from the universe that I should take a break, and I did so immediately.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is designated as "Chick-Lit." I hate designations generally (after you've said fiction or non-fiction, either it's good writing or it's bad writing), but "Chick-Lit" especially seems so condescending and vaguely contemptuous, as if "chicks" had to have special books written for them with small words, short sentences, and large font. "Ah, those brainless little sex objects, bless their hearts; here's a simple little book to keep them busy and away from the shoe stores for a while." I mean, come on, is there a "Beefcake" genre? (Please don't answer that. I don't want to know.)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is a loosely connected sequence of short stories that cover the range of a girl's life from fourteen to an unstated age (which we can guess at precisely because it's unstated) as she tries to come to grips with what love is and should be for her. Like so many of us, she makes one disastrous mistake after another over the years before she stumbles into a healthy relationship, and it is that process that links the stories. It is not quite a novel, but the linked stories make it a sort of novel in the way that Jack Schaeffer's Monte Walsh was. (That's Manly-Cowboy fiction, for you genre addicts.)
But describing the book this way trivializes it. Romeo and Juliet can be summarized as "Chick-Lit, sub-genre, Boy-Meets-Girl," but in Shakespeare's hands, the story becomes a trifle more interesting than that. In Melissa Bank's hands, Jane and her family and eventually her lovers become, if not as majestic and heroic as the Montagues and the Capulets, very real and specific people in specific places at a specific time, which is another way of saying universal. The very first story in the collection introduces us to Jane as a fourteen-year-old, and in Melissa Bank's hands, Jane becomes as awkwardly and sardonically real for the advent of the twenty-first century as Holden Caulfield was for the middle of the twentieth. And it was that intelligent and perceptive adolescent girl who remained with me throughout the other stories; she may have aged and gotten smarter (and funnier), but she was still Jane trying to make sense of her brother's choice of girlfriend, still Jane trying to get along with a boss without getting squashed by the same, still Jane trying to reconcile the men in her life with her idea of love. It's what we all do, on both sides of the sexual border.
Melissa Bank's writing is lean and compelling and very funny. I'm only giving the book four stars because I found one story to be jarringly out of place; not in style or tone, but because it was told from another person's point of view, and that jarred me out of the flow of the book. But if all "Chick-Lit" is as good as The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, then count me in as a brainless little sex object.
faithanns
Dec 9, 2008
Read this!
This is one of my favorite books. It is funny and emotional, and also very very addicting! I could not put it down. I recommend this book to people who love witty, love stories with great humor.
