The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists | Neil Strauss

The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists | Neil Strauss | Review contains spoilers of a sort

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The Game: Undercov...

	The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists Neil Strauss Canongate Books, 2005 - 452 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Great as a novel, fascinating as non-fiction

Even if this book was total fiction, it would be a great read. Stories about geeks that find their mojo are always fun.

But what's fascinating is that it's real. This book isn't so much a how-to-pick-up-women guide as it is a biography of all the people that have been hawking techniques for doing it over the past few years. You can learn a lot about the various characters and pick-up styles floating around in the "seduction business".

A lot of the people he discusses in the book such as Tyler Durden and David DeAngelo have their own websites and workshops, and they take the ideas he touches on in this book even further. Intrigued, I started cross-checking some of the theories the pick-up artists use with work by anthropologists and body language experts. A lot of it holds water.

While I doubt I'll ever approach strangers on the street with card games, I actually tried some of the more basic stuff the PUA's talk about on some dates, and was amazed at how well and quickly it all worked. Most people think that attraction is totally physical, in-an-instant and genetic. But surprisingly, you really can make yourself seem more valuable by the ways you do and don't behave. Don't know if I'd actually marry a girl that's that easily led in, but still, there's no question that this stuff works on a lot of people.

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Review contains spoilers of a sort

What this book is and what it isn't: "The Game" is a narrative of Strauss' (and others') activities as (a) member(s) of a loose association of men who try to learn and apply various methods of attracting women. The book is not a handbook or instruction manual detailing those methods: though one might abstract such from "The Game," there are surely many faster ways of getting the information-check, perhaps, the associated books Amazon suggested when you searched for this one-and the interested potential reader is hereby directed to one of those sources.
The weak points of this book are (a) that the writing is mediocre and (b) the narrative as such quickly (after about 100 pages) becomes tedious. The book goes downhill quickly.
Nevertheless, the book is interesting to read, mainly because of the characters. This is one of the few media products I have experienced-the other one that quickly comes to mind is the film version of "The Beach"-in which every last character is unattractive. Indeed, there are only two characters (Courtney Love, flatly portrayed as a lunatic, and Britney Spears, who comes off as a simply typical human, not particularly bad, interesting, or good) who are not utterly venal and stunningly dull. Given the desires that allow the characters to enter the narrative, it goes without saying that the "pick-up artists" portrayed here will be repulsive and pathetic (as indeed they are), but one might expect at least some of the characters to be interesting (as in contrast with willfully colorful). None, however, is.
Another remarkable point is that virually all of the main characters (excepting two peripheral participants) come off here as stupid people. Strauss several times remarks that sundry men drop out of schools or universities to practice their "skills": given what the characters say and do, the reader is lead to strongly suspect that these characters, had they not dropped out of school or quit their jobs, would have failed out or been fired. Despite cringe-inducing attempts to convince the reader of the contrary-..."but I like cool movies"...Strauss, himself a character in his book, manages to portray himself as a bonehead as well, this no small accomplishment for an author, inasmuch as the reader concludes that this writer has to be genuinely stupid and not simply portraying himself as such.
If you buy this book cheap and are prepared to put it down about a third of the way through, it will afford the same degree of reward that a poor horror novel does. No decent person would wish the characters' experiences for him- or herself or for anyone else, but there is some interest in once in a while reading about the sorely unattractive.

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