Claire Conger

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, a book of seven interconnected short stories by Melissa Bank, has excellent advice about dating: Be yourself!

Dr Phil, I’m sure, would agree.

All of the stories are told in the first person and concern dating or considering marriage with one’s live-in partner, most of them in a context of parents and siblings: What does my dad think of my boyfriend? Who is my brother dating now?

Ms Bank reveals U.S culture in little nuggets that are telling of my own experience. In “The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine” the protagonist’s grandmother “clicks around the kitchen in her high heels . . . couldn’t bring up my father. But then I realized she was trying to help: make everything appear fine and sooner or later it would be. This was what she’d taught my mother.” (page 186)

As you can see, Ms Bank’s prose is elegant and straightforward.

My favorite story was the book’s namesake, “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” which first appeared in Zeotrope: All-Story Volume 2 Number 1, Winter 1998.

In this story, Ms Bank has great fun with the hard-to-get manipulations prescribed in The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right (copyright 1995) by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.

Ms Bank’s protagonist (Jane) reads a book called “How to Meet and Marry Mr Right” and its authors Faith Kurtz-Abromowitz and Bonnie Merrill appear and talk to her, getting in her way and making her follow their rules. She has her fish (Robert) on the line for a while, but he drops the hook because he doesn’t like the way she’s behaving. He nibbles again when she cuts Faith and Bonnie’s bait and learns that her true self is the lure.

It turns out that there really is a book called How to Meet and Marry Mr Right; it’s by Linda Curcio, copyright 1998. One wonders if Ms Curcio got her title from Ms Bank.