Book Review: The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing (2000) by Melissa Bank

Why do we read and re-read books? Why do certain bestsellers seem to age well like fine wines, while others are just assembly-line cheap thrills that entertain and fail to satisfy … la fast food? I am always appreciative when I pick up a book that I turned up my nose at a few years ago, only to discover that it is funny, witty, sad, beautiful, and everything I wanted in a paperback. The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is one such book.

The Girl's Guide was almost ten years old by the time I picked it up, with some reservation. Hailed as a vanguard of the Chick Lit revival (think The Devil Wears Prada, Bridget Jones's Diary, etc.), I already steeled myself to hate it, to read it while laying in the sun and to toss it down with disgust after reading bullshit about boys/men, mothers and fathers, and other nasty perpetuations of gender stereotypes and relationships. I was happily surprised to find instead an engrossing collection of seven short stories revolving around a helpfully named Jane.

Jane is a smart, funny girl (and later woman) who has problems with relationships. I don't really want to talk about why because the book doesn't address the problems head-on until the end, and frankly it's unimportant because I like Jane so much and I want her to be happy. Only one story centers on her downstairs neighbors and a family dinner with a prodigal son, although the neighborly connection doesn't become apparent until a few stories later. You never find out what happens to this family, and again it is unimportant because the reader is so engrossed in Jane's life and her character.

I might consider giving Chick Lit a college try, because of how delighted I was with Bank's book. I am often tired of reading books by men about men, or even worse, books by women about men (sorry, Zadie, you're guilty of it too) that frustrate me to no end with their depictions of gender relations. Sluts and vamps, nerds and geeks, undesirable vs. desirable...is that really the binary world we live in? The Sexed and the Sexless? Please don't pitch that as a soap because I'm on it. Banks writes about people who are themselves, who are smart and think about themselves and others. Her characters are self-aware, they get better, they fail and they succeed and make mistakes and overcome them. There is no gender binary because their human foibles bind them so tightly together that there's no point in identifying trends based on sex.

This book was refreshing, and not just because I love short stories. I love smart literature with smart characters, and I love it when I read a book and I don't think about the author (again, sorry Zadie...love ya) but about the content. Sometimes I think I love too much.