The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook

AUTHOR: Matt Dunn

PUBLISHED: 2010

GENRE: Fiction

As you may have noticed, my forays into the world of chick lit have not gone particularly well, so I figured I would try the other side: guy lit.  Before reading this, I had always thought of guy lit as, oh, I don’t know, Chuck Palahnuik.  But apparently there’s a whole counterculture to Bridget Jones’ Diary and Confessions of a Shopaholic.  Apparently, men want to read about love, too.*  Hey, there’s a market for Amish romance novels, so why not sappy guys in love?

Edward Middleton (no relation to the Duchess of Cambridge, as far as I know) is perfectly content just floating along in life, until the day he comes home to a cleaned-out apartment and a Dear John letter from his girlfriend of ten years, Jane.  But Jane hasn’t pulled the old “it’s not you, it’s me” card – she’s blatantly told Edward it’s him.  More specifically, it’s the way he’s let himself go and become a boring old man – so boring she had to go to Tibet for 3 months.  When she comes back, though, if he’s made a change… well, then just maybe, there will be hope for them.  So Edward, with the help of his metrosexual friend Dan, a trainer named Sam, and lots of money, sets out to make himself the man Jane will want.

Everything about this story is literal; there' no depth or subterfuge anywhere.  The people around Edward are nothing but stereotypes: Dan, the suave minor celebrity who beds a different woman every night and kicks then out every morning with no remorse; Wendy, the sassy bartender who’s always available to give a real woman’s opinion; and Samantha, the spunky personal trainer who doesn’t take any gruff.  Edward’s not all the much better himself – a portly, sad-sack 30-something who just wants his old life back.  Over time, he loses a little weight and gains a little self-respect, but that’s about it.

Dunn is another one that suffers from the impression that having his characters speak exactly like real people is a good idea.  It’s not.  It’s boring.  His idea of fleshing out an idea is to have one character not get it, so that the other character has to repeat it multiple times, which does nothing but make his characters seem extraordinarily dim-witted.  His word choice also leaves a lot to be desired.  In one dinner scene, he writes that Dan “speared a piece of chicken on his fork” (as opposed to on his spoon?) “and popped it in his mouth”.  It’s not grammatically wrong per se, but those two verbs don’t go together.  I spent the next 5 minutes trying to figure out the angle and speed at which he’d have to flick his fork to get the chicken piece to “pop” into his mouth.  That’s not what you want you reader to be focused on.  Unfortunately, it happens a lot.

Despite its label of “guy lit”, I cannot imagine a man wanting to read this book.  Even though it was written by a guy, it reads like it was written by a woman trying to emulate a man’s thinking.**  Worse than that, it doesn’t go anywhere.  I actually cared less about these characters on the last page than I did on the first.  At that point, it really doesn’t matter who’s writing for whom. 

LENGTH: 368 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT?: I really don’t see guy lit taking over the market like chick lit has.

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No.  This story was about as deep as the paper it was printed on. 

*It does explain James Patterson and Sundays at Tiffany’s. 

**I know, I know.  I’m engaging in all sorts of gender stereotyping right now.  My sociology professor would be horrified.  Oh well.