The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss: Book Review

Want to make yourself irresistible to women? Fancy being a master of seduction?
This book is the story of a man who learnt how, who learnt the secrets of the Game. Neil Strauss wasn't exactly your prototypical loveless loser, but then he wasn't terribly irresistible either. An everyman of the dating game, with ever-declining hair and glasses, the initial change involved a makeover into the shiny-bonced, sharply goateed figure gracing the cover of The Game. The physical transformation, however, was only the first and the easiest of the alterations Strauss would make.
Months later, he was living in the daddy of bachelor pads, hanging out with models, dating a string of beautiful women and chatting up Britney Spears. Not bad for a balding journalist on the less youthful side of thirty. It's certainly an enticing prospect as a book. Less the self-help guide it might appear, The Game is more a diary of Strauss' descent/ascent (depending on your point of view) into the "seduction community", and the story of his transformation into Style, his infinitely-more-successful-with-women alter-ego.

"There were five of us living in the house: Herbal, Mystery, Papa, Playboy and me. Boys and men came from every corner of the globe to shake our hands, take photos with us, learn from us, be us. They called me Style. It was a name I had earned."
Strauss is a gifted writer - perhaps not surprisingly, as the author of a number of successful rock biographies prior to his emergence as Style. He opens in medias res, plunging us evocatively straight into the life of a PUA (a Pick-Up Artist, that is - the first of many in-terms and buzzwords fizzing around the community). It's not all especially pretty though; we get a sense of men who have passed into hubris:

"The white carpet had gone gray from the constant traffic of young, perfumed humanity herded in off Sunset Boulevard every night. Cigarette butts and used condoms floated grimly in the Jacuzzi."
Not somewhere everyone would want to live, perhaps. This Rome-has-fallen picture Strauss builds up makes for a tantalising opening to The Game. We have questions; principally, assuming we've read the blurb to get a picture of the man who was Neil, 'How did he get like this?' Feelings too - feelings that lie somewhere between wonder, envy and distaste, most probably.
We're made to wait for the answers though. Instead, it's back to the beginning, as pre-Style Strauss meets the man who will become his mentor, the suitably-named Mystery. I'll leave the details of his transformation to the realms of the mysterious. Suffice to say, the process comprises a combination of common sense, genuine "secrets of the game" and good old-fashioned bullshit. The science of seduction is evidently taken very seriously amongst those who claim to be its leading practitioners - there are systems, acronyms, philosophies and sciences. Techniques range from having a arsenal of conversation-starters ready to put to use through to developing an understanding of Neuro-Linguistic Programming - and Strauss is pretty good at bringing the subtleties (and occasionally, absurdities) of these across.
The theory is hardly the main part of the book, however. Strauss is at his best describing human interactions, and in The Game, this is all about the nightclubs, the parties, the girls and the rival guys, the experts and the wannabees. Through the wit and style of his writing, we get an insight into the kind of personality it takes to be a PUA; if the author seems a little arrogant towards the end of the book, this is probably a reflection of the makeover he's put himself through. The Game chronicles a fascinating experiment, and Strauss is a gutsy, talented Guinea Pig who manages to hit a chord with both readers and those around him in the story. However, the feeling of envy and admiration the reader may have held at the outset dissipates drastically as the book reaches its climax. This isn't really a fault of the writing, although the pace does fall away and the narrative does lose interest somewhat. Rather, one just begins to pity those involved in the seduction game; they simply come across as obsessive, needy geeks who play the law of averages, pestering endless women until one relents and sleeps with them. Okay, so they're nerds who have a lot of sex, but they're still nerds.
If this was the impression Strauss was intending to convey (and it's likely it was), he succeeds masterfully. The men we met are portrayed as winners in bed, losers in life. If Style is a little removed from this, and as a narrator he often is, it's to his credit. So, The Game may not be a manual that supplies the shortcut to making oneself irresistible, but it never really claims to be, beyond some effective marketing. The advice that's contained here can be boiled down to a couple of common-sense maxims; if you want to be successful with women (or men, for that matter), exude confidence and develop good conversational skills; despite all the blustering the protagonists of the book trot out, there's little essential that exceeds this. It's not a perfect book, but Strauss is likeable enough to keep our sympathies and pull the story along at an enjoyable pace. The Game is entertaining and very occasionally enlightening, and paints an engrossing, if not altogether positive picture of a quite peculiar sub-culture.