The best writing creates and evokes a dense web of relationships-between character and character, narrator and author, author and reader-existing on multiple levels. But what about the author, the one and only “Style”? We know why Mystery, Tyler Durden, and the grotesques did what they did. As autobiography, it’s merely OK-because, though the book is about Strauss’s transformation, it offers little insight into himself. As an exploration of social norms and a work of gonzo journalism, The Game endures. The Game was a raging success because it contrasted with these boring books, voicing discontentment with pre-existing forms: our parents’ dating paradigms, our awkward personal styles. For what is all this escapism but the manifestation and denial of low self-esteem, in a less hurtful and more boring way? Even if he were, villainy would be preferable to heroism: In the era of nice-guy intellectuals, white-male narcissists, and webcomics whose depth is stick figures shouting out the literal definition of depression, we need someone to not make nice. That Strauss is the villain of The Game and The Truth is fortunately untrue. It doesn’t matter that its specific tactics are bad enough they stop working three-quarters of the way through the book, that the cast of characters is a clusterfuck of dysfunction, or that the “insight” at the end that these characters “had low self-esteem” is laughably obvious: People read The Game, talked about it, and thought about relationships and gender norms differently after they had done so.
Like it or not, The Game is one of the most, uh, seminal, books of the 21st century. Mention The Game in polite company at your own peril: The very phrase “triggers” not just feminists and “good men,” but free-lovers, free-thinkers, readers and writers too-people who have experienced, at least vicariously, that side of life. If you were to judge him by people’s reactions to The Game, the The Truth’s notorious predecessor, you’d probably take him at face value. “I am not the hero in this story … I am the villain.” Thus proclaims Neil Strauss on the back cover of The Truth.
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