Given its title, Melissa Bank's first book was always going to catch both attention and column inches. What is both refreshing and exciting is that this is a book that is truly worthy of both. It is actually a collection of seven short stories, yet like Susan Minot's fine collection, Monkeys, all the stories are about the same people - or more precisely in the case of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, about the same person: Jane Rosenal.
We first meet Jane in "Advanced Beginners" as a 14-year-old, a little lonely and bored in New Jersey, being introduced to her brother's new girlfriend, Julia. Julia uses words like "extraordinary" and "exquisite," while Jane is at the stage where, as her brother phrases it, her "IQ goes up and down about 50 points in every conversation". In Bank's hands, that summer is stripped down to its barest bones - there is a house being built that will block out their view of the sea, brother Henry turns into a Hank, and gradually Jane comes to like and then admire Julia, just as Henry decides to dump her. It is clear that Bank has fine-tuned the art of description of place - a museum is described as "like the house of a rich old woman who didn't want you to visit" - and also of the subtle emotions that flare up in adolescence and never quite go away. As Jane mocks Julia to her friend Linda, she comments: "We laughed, but right afterward, trying to fall asleep, I felt terrible."
The rest of the stories trace Jane's move from gauche teenager to 30-something New Yorker. There are the ups and downs of her career in publishing, the slow decline of her beloved father and even one story about the neighbours downstairs. But for the most part, the link between the stories is a rather unreconstructed one - that of Jane's attempts to play the dating game. There is Jamie, who takes her to visit his ex-girlfriend, and then for a long time there is Archie, an editor some 28 years her senior.
With one notable exception, these are not stories about finding and keeping your man. Bank is much more interested in the shifting emotions and fumblings towards control that go on in relationships. As the book's title and the short quotes which preface each story suggest, Jane is eternally searching for the correct way to do things, the way to become a more proficient person.
The one exception is the final story of the collection and the one which lends its title to the book. Sadly this is also the weakest story, the only one in which Bank somewhat loses her way and writes the neatly parcelled love story with a happy ending that she has so far avoided. The impulse to send her heroine happily into the sunset must have been a strong one, but in succumbing to temptation she has slightly undermined the rich complexity of her earlier portraits.
For the most part, though, Bank's writing sings with that quiet, deceptively simple honesty that somehow is peculiarly American. If she owes more than just the structure of her book to Minot - their stripped-back style is somewhat similar - Bank suffers nothing in the comparison. There is a humour, a kind of kooky oddness to her writing and her characters, that is all her own, and it is this which should ensure that both book and author will crop up again and again this summer and beyond.
Louise East is an Irish Times columnist