July 2000

The New Yorker's review of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing cautioned in a pithy tone, "Anybody who writes about Melissa Bank's new book . . . without mentioning Helen Fielding's bestseller is doing so just to be contrary, and should not be trusted." Dear reader, in an effort to establish my credibility I vow to tackle the issue straightaway and as painlessly as possible. I think we'll all sleep a little easier (and love Bank's novel for exactly who and what it is) if we can somehow come to terms with "the Bridget factor."

The specter of Fielding's heroine does hover over Bank's rookie novel, but largely as a creation of sound-byte-obsessed mainstream publishing. Elements of Fielding's novel do in fact seem to resonate for many readers of The Girls' Guide…, it's true - I confess, I felt the spirit of Bridget creep into my receptive psyche once or twice while reading this novel. But the parallels are mostly superficial in nature, and have more to do with the current climate of literary marketing than anything.

The grounds for aligning the two novels - their narratives each centering on a single, white, middle class thirtysomething female protagonist, presented in an authorial style that incorporates copious humor - are sure to leave just enough room for a plethora of lazy comparisons. The truth is, publishers and some media reviewers (primarily working for the "big names") snatch up any opportunity to forge easy and profitable alignments. If one text is a real winner, anything that resembles it remotely might be a winner too. Bridget Jones' Diary was a smash-hit of a bestseller, and at the moment is being spun into liquid gold as a big-budget Hollywood film. On the surface, the two books may look like kin, and Fielding comparisons certainly can't hurt the bottom-line profitability of Bank's debut - publishers encourage such parallels wholeheartedly. But the annoyingly gendered generalizations seem to flow easily in the marketing of fiction, and they trickle down into the reviews - the perhaps unconscious, but all too common, assumption that popular fiction written by women and built around an independent female protagonist is all basically cut from the same cloth.

Not that the parallel itself between Fielding's bestseller and Bank's is inherently cause for derision, mind you. I for one admit to having enjoyed an affectionate, laugh-out-loud relationship with Bridget Jones' Diary, with its heroine's humor and persistence - her unflinching (if not consistently progressive) full-frontal humanity. But there ARE significant and noteworthy distinctions between Fielding's novel and The Girls' Guide… As the New Yorker review does eventually suggest, "Bank's is a far more subtle piece of work, which achieves even more than it aims to."

Still, I don't buy the idea that Bank somehow shot low and accidentally hit the bulls-eye with this novel. The Girls' Guide is its own fictional world with a good many solid, stand-alone strengths, signaling the possibility that even finer and sharper works are in store from this new voice in contemporary American fiction. You get the feeling that Bank is just revving up her engines with this one - unlike the unfortunate Fielding, whose Bridget Jones sequel left many readers cold and was perhaps a misguided attempt at raking in more dollar signs on the coattails of the first success. Truly, this is a novel full of subtlety and sophistication that somehow manages not to become hollow or slick. From the Elizabeth Bishop poem that serves as epigraph to the smart, sweet lines that close this narrative, Bank knows just what she's doing.

To my great relief, Melissa Bank has been hailed by a handful of reviewers as the serious writer she truly is. The Denver Post lauds Bank's ability to mix comedy and tragedy in all the right proportions, comparing her to Joseph Heller, Ann Tyler, and John Irving. The News and Observer says she's a "gifted writer, a descendant from the school of restraint whose grandfather is Hemingway and whose father is the early Raymond Carver. The presiding mother figure . . . is Lily Tomlin." (Strange isn't it, and noteworthy, that still, so few literary foremothers grace such lists of canonical greatness? As much as one may admire Tomlin, and I do, The Grandfather and The Father still stand so tall when we look for predecessors.)

If Melissa Bank is the literary world's new "'It' Girl", as New York Magazine proclaims, and if this debut is one of the best coming-of-age tales since Catcher in the Rye, as The Kansas City Star suggests, then perhaps Bank's gender does have something to do with not only the way in which she writes, but the way in which that writing is received, categorized, and discoursed about. It appears as if the reviewing world vacillates between focusing too MUCH on gender, and focusing on it too LITTLE. While Bank might be better appreciated as something more than the slightly trivial flavor-of-the-month "'It' Girl," the importance to literary history and the marketplace of a female coming-of-age narrative well-crafted by a careful artist ought not go unacknowledged.

The Girls' Guide is indeed a challenge to that intensely profitable and slippery borderland of private and public which our current pop culture now voraciously produces and consumes, of truths hidden only to be stolen and exposed, that tantalizing blend of female space and voyeurism that was Bridget's private-diary-cum-novel. Bank's novel is sometimes confessional, but first and foremost it is a female bildungsroman of poignant humor and burgeoning self-awareness, crafted by a talent whose insight delves just deep enough into the interrelationship between bliss and pain. It's not as if female coming-of-age narratives are a contemporary phenomena, but all too rarely are they recognized and valued by mainstream, traditionalist lit geeks and promoted by reviewers who invoke "The Names of The Greats" (primarily male names). That female experiences and female writing make another chink in the armor of the literary meta-narrative in this way speaks to the power of Bank's craft - the novel receives its praise not because it is accommodationist to a traditional standard of genre or form, but because Banks writes this character's whole truth, and it shines in a way that I'm not sure contemporary reviewers can any longer afford to ignore.

Don't go expecting to learn much about lures, decoys, turkey calls, or the wearing of safety orange - at least not of the literal variety. Bank plays brilliantly with the metaphor of the hunt, and by extension with the mythical goddess Diana, in sketching out the fictional Jane Rosenal's evolution through girlhood and young womanhood, through sexuality and love, family and work. What Bank pieces together here is a not a diary but a guide, a user's manual for contemporary American womanhood, a textbook. This allusion to genre and her playful relationship with form bolsters an already unhesitatingly candid voice speaking truths about one young female life, turning notions of ultimate authority topsy-turvey.

Melissa Bank hasn't written a solid novel by accident, nor has she garnered critical acceptance on a bandwagon of white-yuppie-single-girl fiction. She's carefully crafted a worthwhile starter, forging ahead bravely into new stomping grounds. Protagonist Jane Rosenal is a brave girl-guide equal to her creator-medium. The novel flows quickly and effortlessly, and nearly always seamlessly. It's a fun ride, with serious undertones and an intelligent foundation. Expect poignant laughs, but don't go expecting Bridget Jones' Diary, Part III.