Girls just want to read books

>> Why The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing bugged the critics

by JULIET WATERS

Thirsty for a quick summer read, I decided last week to take a look at what has been touted as the American version of Bridget Jones' Diary, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. Recently out in paperback, when the Girls' Guide came out last summer it achieved huge sales (especially for a book of short stories) and condescending reviews. Critics tended to lump it in with a brand of neurotic chick lit notable for being a little too funny and a lot too man-crazy.

But to show just how influential book reviews really are, The Girls' Guide, in its paperback reincarnation, is in its seventh week on the NYT Bestseller list. Also, the book is being adapted to film by Francis Ford Coppola, far better known for dick flicks than chick flicks.

What first struck me about this collection of stories is how utterly unlike Bridget Jones it is; I remained mystified by the comparison until the last story. Bridget Jones is a neurotic, vulgar, thirtyish woman whose life would be a Jane Austen novel if she weren't exactly the kind of woman who would have made Austen wretch. More than chick lit, Bridget Jones is literary satire. Just as Austen first made her mark by satirizing the gothic novel with Northanger Abbey, Helen Fielding has made hers by satirizing the modern novel of intelligent love, where the average-looking brainy chick who longs for self-actualization gets the man, while the man-crazy girls get stuck with the losers.

The Girls' Guide is a truer more traditional form of chick lit. Whatever humour there is in this book comes from the central character Jane, a smart-ass teenager who turns into an insecure pun-addicted young adult. Very much a modern heroine, Jane isn't much of a man hunter. She doesn't have to be. Smart, ambitious, funny enough and pretty enough, some man always seems to be deeply in love with her. For one story it's her first boyfriend Jamie, a tall, handsome laid-back bartender with a beautiful voice. For three other stories it's Archie, an attractive, glamorous middle-aged editor/novelist for a major New York publishing house who writes a novel about her after their first break up.

These stories are less about Jane trying to find a man than trying to find a life. She leaves Jamie for Archie because her great aunt, a once-gorgeous novelist from New York in its Algonquin table days, tells her that she's not really living. Archie becomes Jane's mentor, guiding her through her own rise as an editor at a competing publishing house. When Jane leaves Archie, what she walks away from isn't men, but literature. Or at least the current-day sweatshops of literature, which offer the illusion of glamour as the reward for exploitative, boring, low-paying work.

Jane bails on her career, becomes a temp and eventually lands a job in advertising. A job with less prestige, but one that allows her the time when she gets home to read real books of her own choosing, instead of lame, dull manuscripts. A life move that has not endeared Banks to the literary establishment, particularly critics.

Walking away from both career and love does plunge Jane for a while into loneliness. Ergo the last story, in which Jane, feeling somewhat lost for the first time in her life, decides to try following The Rules. Sadly, like some weird spell, they seem to work, and this quite ordinary woman is being desperately pursued by men. But at what cost?

The Girls' Guide, while well-written, is not a great work of literature. Still it's a fun, comforting book about procrastinating real love for the sake of experience, and getting away with it. And about walking away from a crappy job, just to read books. What more could a girl want from summer reading?

The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. Penguin, pb, 274pp, $18.99