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ReviewsIf the state is to blame for everything, whyshould we be punishing individuals? Eriksson’s most recently translated novel, TheDevil of Dakar, bursts the limits of the detective plot in a decisive way. The murderer inDakar is an immigrant, Manuel, a Mexicanwho comes to Sweden to find his brotherPatricio, in jail for drug smuggling. To getthe money owed to Patricio (and to avengehis brother Angel, who died on another run),Manuel tracks down the two drug dealers who employed his brothers, kills oneof them, and takes a job in the other one’sUppsala restaurant, Dakar, as a dishwasher.The kitchen at Dakar is a mini UN: otheremployees are from Portugal, Spain, Finland, and America. “And we are all gatheredhere,” says one of them, in case we missedthe point, “[i]n Dakar’s kitchen.” The groupbecomes tightly bonded, and Manuel evenbegins a flirtation with Eva, the Swedishwaitress.Although Manuel comes plotting revenge,Dakar becomes a place where he managesto regain his humanity among other outsiders. In the end, after Patricio is sprung fromjail almost by accident, the two brothers slipthrough Ann Lindell’s fingers to return totheir village in Oaxaca.In that sense, The Devil of Dakar is a police novel turned almost entirely upsidedown—the logical conclusion of the processthat begins with Mankell’s doubts aboutsociety’s responsibility for crime. ThoughLindell and the other detectives remainsympathetic characters, the author is clearlyrooting against them—notably, the peoplewho aid Lindell in the manhunt for the twobrothers are generally racist: one speaks of“a dark-skinned man of suspicious appearance.” A certain justice is carried out whenthe drug dealers (both ethnically foreign butwhite), who are presented as the actual badguys, are both punished, one shot by Man-203uel and one finally imprisoned by the policefor drug possession. But the murderer at thecenter of the novel (and the focus of the detectives’ exertions) takes no legal responsibility for his actions—and the detection plotbecomes a sinister tool of white oppression.There are higher laws, The Devil of Dakarsuggests, than our little bourgeois schemesof crime and punishment.—Britt Petersongame theoryNeil Strauss. The Game: Penetrating the Society ofPickup Artists. Reagan Books. September 2005.Neil Strauss. The Rules of the Game. Harper. December 2007.Magnolia, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. January2000.The Pickup Artist. 3Ball Productions, VH1. August2007.The “seduc tion communit y” —most insidious of oxymorons—grew up on messageboards and newsgroups when the internetwas still a place of social exile.The early adopters were people preparedto start life anew—that is, losers, or, as themanuals would eventually call them, average frustrated chumps: AFCs. As in recovery movements, acknowledgment of theproblem was the first step.They were hard-up men perplexed bywomen and determined to figure them out—as they had figured out the algorithms of thecomputer programs they wrote, or the patterns and strategies they mastered to make itthrough the video games they played. Thesewere nerds who had been pushed around byjocks and been envious of cool guys all theirlives. There were things that cool guys did,innocently, as a function of their social programming, that made them cool. The loserswere going to study their behavior, and they

204Reviewswere going to start replicating it. And oncethey were done with the process of breakingdown what the successful behaviors wereand why they worked, and once they weredone rewiring their own brains (which arefar more plastic, the neurologists tell us,than we have ever imagined), they wouldfind they could react in new ways to theold, scary stimuli—ways even more effective than those of their persecutors. In fact,because they were taking a methodical approach to what others did only by instinct,and because they had an analytic understanding of what others did in an unpremeditated way, they were going to be betterat being cool guys than any truly cool guycould ever be.They renamed each other, taking on talismanic handles, each of which declared ahope. Mystery. Extramask. Juggler. Playboy.Sin. Lovedrop. Matador. At sites like alt.fast.seduction.com, men from around the worldposted detailed narrative accounts of theirdates, soliciting, offering, and receivingcritical dissection of every statement andgesture. The men volunteered their experiences as data in a vast scientific trial that noresponsible researcher would ever attempt.You could even say that these men were engaged in a strange parody of the activitiesof the men of the Enlightenment, who usedthe printing press to diffuse a new attitudetoward life that broke with the inherited traditions and dogmas of the past. It was a freeand open exchange of ideas across international borders in which men distilled thechaos of experience into universal principles. Together they created a body of knowledge that was rational, pragmatic, purposive,and—above all—subject to the test of experiment.By means of the collective efforts ofhundreds of recovering AFCs and aspiringPUAs (pickup artists, in the literature), theywere able to observe, tag, categorize, anddevise a winning response to every twitch,flutter, or hesitation that a woman might offer in the progress, as their eventual leaderMystery would flatly put it, “from meet—tosex.” If a subject looked back at all his successful sexual encounters, he would see thateach and every one of them passed througha sequence of three stages. Mystery definedthese as attraction, building comfort, andseduction. By detaching oneself from thewelter of passions that afflict us in our everyday behaviors, one could arrive at a methodto move through those stages, consciously,and with maximum efficiency.All of us who have tried and failed tobreak through to the opposite sex thinkabout what works and what doesn’t whenit comes to the entirely unnatural sociability one must learn to master in a city full ofstrangers. The internet created a new spaceto transform that blind empirical gropinginto what would become, in the hands of itsmost gifted practitioners, a positivistic system of human relations.We have a record, of sorts, of what theworld of the pickup arts used to be like. TomCruise is the medium, in the role of FrankTJ Mackey, in Magnolia. Mackey opens hisclass by slowly flexing his biceps beneath abrightening spotlight on a darkened stageof a rented hotel conference room. Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra blaststhrough the speakers.“Respect the cock!” Cruise shouts, tothe answering cries and bellows, hoots andchanting of his audience, “and”—and withthis he launches himself to the lip of thestage, revealing his chiseled face to the camera, kneeling with his arm outstretched ina gesture of embattled striving—“tame thecunt!”

ReviewsHis students are beefy rage-filled mooksin pleated Dockers. They work themselvesinto a frenzy at every cue, including themoment in Cruise’s presentation when hefeigns the act of intercourse—intercoursefrom behind—onstage. They learn how to,as the overhead projections tell them “FakeLike You Are a Nice and Caring Guy.” Theyare instructed to “Form a Tragedy,” as atechnique for earning sympathy, all in service of turning “Your ‘Friend’ into a ‘SpermReceptacle.’ ”Cruise’s portrayal was a cartoon thatnonetheless captured something about thestate of the pickup artists in their early days.The pioneering figure of the online seduction community was a man named Ross Jeffries, whom the music writer Neil Strauss,in his immersive account of the PUA worldtitled The Game, describes as a “tall, skinny,porous-faced self-proclaimed nerd.” Jeffries’searly e-books, which relied on a pseudohypnotic technique called neuro-linguisticprogramming (which instructs its would-bepractitioners to “seed” conversation withsubtly hidden commands that will act on thesubconscious of the recipient), were crudelywritten and full of sarcasm, resentment, andrage. His e-books were distinguished by thetypographical quirkiness, tonal crudeness,and brash salesmanship common to thework of autodidactic experts. Jeffries claimsthat Frank TJ Mackey was based on him.Though Jeffries certainly looks nothing likeTom Cruise (Strauss quotes Cruise denyingthat his character was based on Jefferies) theclaim was an entirely plausible one.“There’s no such ‘thing’ as love. There’s nosuch ‘thing’ as passion. There’s no such ‘thing’as attraction, or chemistry, or lust,” Jeffrieswrote in one of his early manuals.I know, I know, you’re saying. That’sthe problem . for most of you, most205of the time, there’s no such thing.There’s just boredom, frustration,and playing with Mr. Winky. Butthat’s not what I’m talking about, sopay close attention.I’m not saying that people don’t experience *states* of ‘attraction’ or‘chemistry’ or ‘lust’. What I am saying is that these states are processesthat take place inside the humanmind and body. Which means thatthey are states that .CAN BE SUMMONED FORTHAND DIRECTED AT WILL!!!Neil S tr auss le arned about this community just as it was beginning to make itstransition from being the obsession of a fewweirdos to a flourishing commercial venturefor many weirdos. He was handed a copy ofone of the first “Layguides,” and venturedonto the message boards as a reporter researching a story. It didn’t take long for himto lose his reportorial detachment. Soon hewas stuffing 500 cash into an envelope addressed to Mystery. Strauss overcomes thereader’s skepticism with the same élan withwhich he learned to “blast last-minute resistance,” conceding, with disarming candor,that it is “no easy feat to sign up for a workshop dedicated to picking up women. To doso is to acknowledge defeat, inferiority andinadequacy. It is to finally admit to yourselfthat all these years of being sexually active(or at least sexually cognizant) you have notgrown up and figured it out.”By the time Strauss arrived on the scene,the pickup artists had already begun to cleanup their act. The documents they wrote werebecoming more professional in their styleand presentation, the theoretical framework