Book review: The Alabaster Girl
Zan Perrion's The Alabaster Girl is an odd genre of book. It is a book about women from a man's perspective written mainly, I think, for men. It is classed on Amazon as literary fiction, and describes itself as a novel, and it isn't either of those. It is not a novel — though it has a fictional part, the explicitly fictional part is scant. It isn't poetry but it is poetic. It is not a dating advice book but it offers many thoughts on dating and love. It's not a novel, it's not poetry, and it's not dating advice. Instead, The Alabaster Girl is an invitation.
The male reader's mission, should he choose to accept it:
[To see women's] sadness, their loss, their faded dreams, their dead and dying relationships, their stultifying careers and responsibilities and... to impart beauty to her life again.
If this book is anything, if it is successful in its rhetoric, it will have at least convinced that reader to ask, "Do I want that mission? Could I take on that mission for a year, a month, a week, a day, just for one night of dancing, just for one outing? Is that a life I want to live?" And if it is really successful, he'll have convinced him he wants that.
In college I took a class on communications and rhetoric, and we discussed advertising. We discussed some alcohol commercial, I forget the brand, but the messaging was simple: "Look at these sexy people having fun, drink this beer and be like them, feel hot and have fun." If The Alabaster Girl is successful, it's as an advertisement for women in general.
Zan invites his reader to see the beauty in women, to love women half as much as he does, and — this is crucial — to reflect that back at them. To help them feel beautiful, and seen. Not just specific women, not just the young or the thin or the conventionally attractive — all of them, the whole shebang. It's an invitation by turns beautiful and challenging.
If you can't tell, it worked on me. I was predisposed to that. More on that later in the review.
It's worth calling out that this book offers a particular pair of glasses for looking at women. They're rose-tinted. They're not scratched or broken — this book is not lying about women, it is not in denial of who they are. It acknowledges that women are just people, just girls, as flawed as any other person. It has a bent, and it's both a necessary bent to take in an advertisement for women and a worthy bent to take. Still, it's worth remembering when Zan describes women in general.
Those generalizations are getting at what it's like to look at women through the pair of glasses he's describing, more than they are describing objectively what women are like. Don't get me wrong, I've got a pair myself, it's a great pair of specs — but it's worth knowing the tint and recognizing when we're wearing them.
If you've listened to other talks Zan has given, the general theses of the book will be familiar. Indeed, many sections match his recording previously discussed on this blog. Maybe as much as 50% of the content is familiar. What's new is interesting, too, though, and I'll probably return to that in other posts.
The book meanders all over the place. It is not a well-organized book. The chapter names tell you how the chapter starts and nothing else about the chapter — Zan's tangents are frequent and wide-ranging. If you're looking for a neat map of the space he's talking about, look elsewhere; Zan won't be giving you one.
As an aside: I honestly think this book could use a map of topics! A fold-out map like a fantasy novel that brings together all of the concepts. He often refers to "the land of women" — give us a literal map! It can't be a complete one, no map of human beings can ever be, but it is impossible to follow all of Zan's ideas the way he meanders. He spends a decent part of the book, at least one chapter, criticizing the modern framework for relationships because it doesn't work. A map could do a lot to capture in memory, through our imagination, the finer details of what he's saying. It could provide an alternative framework not for relationships, not for analyzing relationships (he hates that), but for men learning to relate better with women.
It is beautiful, though. It's full of lovely turns of phrase and the occasional inspired metaphor. On page 11, he writes of the women he has loved:
how I dream of them still, like the rain dreams of the sea.
It's a good metaphor. Rain comes from the sea like men of women born. Rain gathers and moves toward the sea in rivers, seeking out the sea like (straight) men seeking women. The rain and sea will inevitably part at some point, one way or another. Rain inevitably parts from the sea. By nature, rain parts and returns and parts. Evaporation can represent both birth and separation (from one's partner due to death, circumstance, or what-have-you). It's an excellent metaphor that captures a lot of what he's going for with the book. The book's suffused with beautiful language like this.
Now and again the book encourages men to just get out there. You're going to fuck it up and make mistakes, approach women that aren't interested, you're going to be too pushy sometimes, you're going to get rejected, Zan says. It's okay, he says. What's important is that you're learning to do better. He says this in a few different places in a few different ways. This is one significant part of the book's value to me.
I find a lot of this book's value in the challenges it offers re: the physics of the "land of women." I have prior ideas about how things work there and how to operate in that land. Because I don't want to be a creep (an important goal), I have habitually played it safe, which rarely sparks amazing interactions. This book challenges the idea that you must play it safe to avoid creepiness. It does so by telling stories of bold actions women didn't merely accept but found exciting.
Zan argues, for example, that it is better to "err on the side of possibilities." He argues it's better to approach a woman who isn't signaling an invitation to him than ignore one that is. He writes that "A woman might resent a man for testing her resistance, but she will despise him for not doing so." That's challenging: It is unconventional, not how one is "supposed to" operate.
Right after that (pages 206-208), he tells a story of flirting with a waitress through a bold hypothetical. I find it surprising on at least three levels.
First, I hear (though I've never seen it myself) that waitresses are often hit on and so it's exasperating for them, don't bother them. Even more, he describes her as a beautiful woman and so she ought to have it even worse than that. But in his story, she takes it quite well.
Second, she doesn't immediately affirm interest in words. He makes his hypothetical proposal, and she says she would hypothetically say no — but her body language is saying, I liked that, I'm flattered. And he goes on a little bit, and she repeats that she would say no. And then he's quiet. And then finally she says that "to that [proposal]" she would probably say yes. She starts out saying no and takes a subjective minute or two to come around — in her own time, free of pressure — to "actually, yes." That boggles my mind — that she would say no and then yes after taking a minute to cook.
Third, and closely related, he's persistent (not pushy) and it works?! After the first no, he comments that it was a ridiculous proposal to make to a stranger (but isn't, I think, ashamed of having made it). He says he was just curious (again, I think, not ashamed). It's odd because the words have a lot in common with "I didn't mean anything by it," but what he's actually saying with them is "the offer stands." What really surprises me though is that he's once again clearly communicating his interest, and he's left her an out of pretending to take him at his word. He's persistent without being pushy — it's magic! Sufficiently advanced flirting is indistinguishable from magic! How on earth does a guy do that so casually?
There are many other stories that challenge my understanding of the "physics" in other ways. He discusses a hypothetical home movie date (a third date) over pages 211-213, arguing "movie" in this context is a euphemism and the guy screws it up by sitting too far away from the lady, sending mixed signals. He claims on page 167 that women think about sex "constantly," and that once the cat's out of the bag, "they stop pretending." He tells on page 300 how he's been in bed with women telling him about "the guy she really likes" and asking him for advice, which he gives her. Those surprise me enough, and then there's another story.
On pages 256-259, he tells a story about bantering with one woman — who's feigning disinterest — when another appears and catches his eye. He leaves the first woman mid-conversation to go talk to this new woman, who says she's from far away and has to catch a plane in the morning and catch her when she's home. So he goes back to the first woman, and she takes him to task for it — and conventionally I'd expect this is for real, but it seems she's only pretending to be offended, because he admits to the charges and she keeps on talking, apparently unperturbed. I'm confused, and yet — it's so "in character" for Zan that maybe some woman would make allowances for it. It seems just plausible.
It is worth wondering, and I have, whether the stories he tells are true. I think many of them are mostly true, although I suspect they are lightly fictionalized. The Alabaster Girl gives the girls names, like Marta or Michelle or Sophie, whereas when he tells stories in his talks, he doesn't. Giving their real names would seem to go against his espoused policy (mentioned in the recording previously discussed) of "don't kiss and tell," unless they agreed to be first-named. They might have, but given the number of stories (there are a lot, perhaps 10 to 20% of the 400 pages are stories, each about 1-3 pages long), I think it's more likely he tweaked the details and the names of a real encounter in writing the stories. It is possible he made his stories up entirely, but I doubt it.
It doesn't matter anyway because we will never know for sure. The point isn't whether they're true. The point is to inspire us to action and love of women. The real question is, do these stories inspire me to good action in the world? That's a question I can only answer by acting on what I learned from them and checking if it feels right.
Zan says that women are complicit in their own seduction, and what's funny is that his audience is, too. We're complicit in our own seduction by his ideas. I want to love women. It's why I read this book and it's why I'm writing this review. If that desire resonates at all, if you want to love women — read this book.