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.
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