The central conceit of The Great Big Book of Guys is simple. In chapters with such titles as “Amigos,” “Bad Boys,” and “Codgers,” noted playwright and CBC broadcaster Erika Ritter uses each letter of the alphabet as a point of departure for a personal exegesis of and expostulation on men.

In a manner befitting these confessional times, much of the book consists of Ritter’s descriptions of her adultery, her mother’s adultery, her friends’ adultery, her ex-lovers, and her ex-husband’s homosexuality, leaving the reader uncomfortably wondering if these people are still alive and wishing the author had applied her talents to a novel.

Ritter is best when she abandons personal history, as she does in an amusing chapter on poor Ken, late of Ken and Barbie, a victim of women’s changing social roles. But these moments are too few, and the book reads as more trite than funny. Ritter’s reworking of the alphabet serves to perpetuate gender polarization through generalizations: all single men buy toilet paper rolls by the ton; men are like dogs, though less complicated – in contrast to the sisters who commune meaningfully in ladies’ rooms and paint their dogs’ toenails.

The book belongs firmly in the chick lit genre and is aimed at the Sex in the City crowd, who fancy themselves empowered when they publicly reveal the intimate details of their lives while simultaneously denigrating half the world’s population. In one not particularly witty statement in the penultimate paragraph, Ritter wonders “whether keeping men in cages for breeding purposes wouldn’t solve more social problems than it might arguably present.” Not surprisingly, this comment appears in a chapter entitled “Zealots.”