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Namedrop: Books That Will Get You Laid

February 8, 2010 by Sarah

Or: BOOKS MY SLUTTY FRIEND JONATHAN NAMEDROPS TO GET LAID
My slutty friend Jonathan’s romantic entanglements are governed by the credo “Give the pretty ones a book and the smart ones a hat.”
This works for him, if you consider having sex with lots and lots (and lots) of people important. This is a brief selection of the books that have worked best for him.*

(BTW, the above quote is from Up At the Villa by William Somerset Maugham: a novella that my slutty friend Jonathan for some reason expects me to have read. I haven’t read it, but I DID read the spoiler article about it on Wikipedia – which is where I get the bulk of my information – and from that, I gathered that it was a kind of suspense/thriller about sexual politics in the 1940s. It sounds, at least from the Wiki article, like a romping good time: sex, murder, intrigue, scandal and etcetera. Like Melrose Place, but more words.)

Justine – Lawrence Durrell

“It goes without saying that if you intend to employ literature and gifts in any seduction that the book should be about seduction,” says the expert.

In college a boy I didn’t know very well came to class with a copy of Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone for me. It was a terrible novel about a fat girl who feels sad or something. I don’t know why I finished the book except that it was like watching a dumb middle aged man trying have an intelligent conversation with a precocious 13-year old: satisfyingly embarassing. Anyway, the boy asked me out, but I already thought he was weird by then. Justine would have been a better choice, since it’s more about pedalistalization and love than it is about sex.

“Justine makes the dynamics (of love) almost too clear. It’s effective because it articulates things we’ve all thought or sensed so succinctly that it solves mysteries – the benefit of this is that by giving this book you get credit for being aware of the answers first,” Jonathan says. Knowing the answers first: important when playing Jeopardy and/or trying to get laid.

Les Liasons Dangereuse – De Choderlos de Laclos

“If the girl is very aware of the whole cat and mouse aspect of the seduction game I will give her this if she hasn’t read it already,” Jonathan says. Me, I don’t know, because I haven’t read it yet. But I did see Cruel Intentions, Cruel Intentions 2, and Cruel Intentions 3. Frankly, I’m not even sure that Jonathan has read it either, because when I wrote him to ask for more material he ignored my request and responded with some tangential garbage about the Marquis De Sade.

So what I’m going to do now is the figurative equivalent of a little step-step-shuffle-step, an embarrassed clearing of the throat, and….

Written on the Body – Jeannette Winterson

Now this one I’ve read, and it remains (in my memory) the literary equivalent of being blindfolded and led, by the soft, warm hand of a loved one through Jema el Fna in Marrakesh: exciting, frightening, totally fucked up. I had just been dumped by my first love (he’d told me it was because he needed to be alone to pursue his dream of becoming a rockstar and somehow I never equated that with “I’d like to sleep with people who aren’t you” but the books idea that love is measured by loss somehow exalted my grief to a place that made it all seem truly significant merely because he’d dumped me, which is a pretty neat trick if you ask me.

“This is good to let a girl know that you know what she’s thinking because the ambiguity of the narrator’s gender suggests that in matters of love and desire there are no roles and thoughts proscribed by gender,” Jonathan told me. “But that’s not true, of course,” he added.

The Rachel Papers – Martin Amis

I loved this book. It was published in 1973, but holds up incredibly well besides a few references to The Beatles and Nixon and the absence of cell phones and the world wide web.

“The Rachel Papers is more about the game than the underlying motives. It’s very clever and very funny and still tactically sound. And the bottom line of course is that in the end, the games don’t help that much in matters of the heart,” Jonathan says. “Bullshit, of course,” he goes on. “It’s the game that matters, and the heart not at all.”

And that, my friends, is how Jonathan The Happy Bachelor sees it.

*Disclaimer: I can’t promise this will work for you or you or you or you (that’s all of you, right?) It’s never worked for me. Then again, trying to be more like Wilt Chamberlain isn’t on my current list of priorities.

NEXT WEEK: BOOKS I NAMEDROPPED IN THIRD GRADE (including, but not limited to, Clan of the Cave Bear)

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