2.0 out of 5 stars
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 21, 2015
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
“I fear all Greeks, even those bearing gifts”
-Vergil, the Aeneid
This book is interesting mostly as a character study of its author, Neil Strauss. I read The Game and found fascinating the extent to which he craved respect and admiration from others, and to feel superior to them. The whole book was an exercise in power, in letting everyone know that though he wasn’t good-looking, he was smart enough to manipulate women into sleeping with him anyway, cool enough to socialize with celebrities without being star struck, and talented enough to write for influential publications like the NY Times.
In this book, too, there is no doubt that Strauss is a master manipulator. He writes about feeling dorky, or ashamed, inviting our sympathy and drawing us into the story, making us care. Then he “shows” us that he’s actually not a dork by having lots of threesomes with women, because most people think that having a threesome in itself makes you cool. But now he’s inside our heads, the place he most longs to be – in control of our thoughts and emotions (or so he hopes).
So one of the things about this book is that it is structured like Homer’s Odyssey. Though Strauss mentions Odysseus and James Joyce’s Ulysses, he never explicitly communicates that he actually models the book on the epic poem itself – this is because he wants to feel smarter and more cultured than the people reading his book – it’s his own little private joke on us, to make him feel powerful. And I suppose he thinks that he’s impressing those of us who do get the allusions (witches and guides and siren songs for example) and cute little references (he names his dog Hercules).
The Odyssey was a great poem, but it was also an incredibly misogynistic one, and one of its functions was to reaffirm and perpetuate the idea that women are objects fulfilling different roles in a man’s life – dutiful wife, seductive but deadly sorceress, nymphomaniac, ball-busting bitch. Though Strauss claims to come to the conclusion that women should be viewed differently today, the way he writes about the women in his book treats them in pretty much the same way that Homer did millennia ago. Use, discard, repeat. I looked up photos of him and his wife, and it’s clear he hasn’t broken this pattern with her. She’s 15-20 years his junior, clearly less educated than he is, a multiple plastic surgery victim, with a heavily made-up, injected face. She is the picture of American female insecurity. In a picture I saw of them together, he stands above her on a staircase, dressed like some hipster professor, his hand on her body in a proprietary way. She wears – I kid you not – little kid sneakers with sloppily tied laces, cutoff shorts, and a sweatshirt with an ice-cream cone print. The pouty look on her face thinly disguises her fear and insecurity. Equals, yeah.
Something I remember from Agatha Christie books is Miss Marple’s simple but astute insight that a major problem with most people’s way of thinking is that they just believe everything that they’re told. In reality, sometimes what others say is true, but more often than we might guess, it’s not; either because they’re mistaken or simply because they are making it up. Much of “The Truth” is actually not the truth, it’s words that Strauss put together in order to elicit a certain reaction from his readers. To give just one example, when he forms his “harem” of three women (using that word is another attempt to impress us) he would have us believe that the women have never met before or even spoken to or emailed each other. Yet it makes no sense that they wouldn’t have communicated at all before moving into a house together – it’s simply unbelievable. One of the women is very smart and critical, yet he has her regularly fighting with the others for the privilege of sitting next to him in the front seat like a child. I don’t think this happened, it’s simply too out of character for Veronika – or if it did, then his depiction of her is inaccurate. And then he would have us believe that it is only after the failure of the harem experiment did it dawn on him that it wasn’t fair of him to expect them not to have sex with other men while he is able to sleep with other women. Of course it’s not fair, and I kept waiting for him to address it during that section, but he pretends that it didn’t even occur to him until later when he has some big epiphany. Is the title of the book another of Strauss’ private jokes at our expense? In other words, is he merely a narcissist, or is he a full-on sociopath? I don’t know. But there are dozens of times in the book where he is clearly being disingenuous, as anyone with some critical thinking skills can perceive.
Going back to the Odyssey: Of all the Greek characters fighting the Trojan War, Odysseus was the smart one. Not muscled like Achilles or powerful like Agamemnon, but clever and conniving. He uses the power of his words and his wit to get what he wants. This is how Strauss would like to see himself. In his pathology, the way he feels worthy and powerful is by convincing others that he is smarter and cooler than everyone else. This is why he is constantly making little mean comments about people – it reminded me of the negging thing from The Game. Though he claims to be a new, wise person by the end of the book, his methods are the same as ever.
There are so many other things I noticed, like the fact that he never mentions the enormous role money and power play in relationships between men and women. Instead, he has an endless string of epiphanies and clichés that he unloads on us for 400 pages. He is the oh-so-wise dispenser of valuable advice that will blow our minds and change our lives for the better. But he’s no Homer, no Joyce.
Odysseus created the Trojan horse, which the gullible Trojans happily brought inside their city walls. Strauss has this little puppy, which he wants you to swallow hook, line, and sinker. No longer content with just having power over the poor saps who loved The Game and naïve girls at bars, now he craves the admiration of the educated. He’s shed his purple-on-purple ensembles and now wears glasses and sweaters – smart people clothes. I suppose his frenetically working mind will never truly be satisfied, even if he does fool some “intellectuals” out there. I wonder what he’ll come up with next. OK this was really long but I feel better now.
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