Single, with complexes

But, as Bigge would say, I don't want to go off on a tirade here. And anyway, that was nearly half a century ago, those mysterious 1950s. It's not like there's anybody still alive from back then. Plus, the book's central point is well taken: Postmodernism -- at least as Bigge defines it -- has, for many of us, stripped away much of what used to be understandable and sane about dating, and sex, and the world. Perhaps nice, girl-worshipping Single Guys like Bigge have been hit the hardest.

But once you have that notion in hand, it's not so clear what else he's trying to say. There's a long section on dating advice manuals from the '50s, where he mostly makes fun of them. Another long section describes "the Astute Brute," which means a sensitive guy who's not afraid to assert himself, or a category that every single guy falls into, or the Guy who Always Gets The Girl, or the one who never does -- or who knows what. His examples include Arno, the character from Nicholson Baker's novel "The Fermata" (who, unlike you, me and ... Bigge, has the power to stop time, and can thus undress women with impunity), and Tintin, the kid from the Belgian comic series -- who qualifies because, as Bigge notes in passing, the fact that he "has never, ever had a love interest despite starring in twenty-two books." There's an incongruous chapter on the history of indie rock, and ... well, lots more too.

What the book is about, mostly, is pathos: the real, heart-scratching pathos of a grown man like Bigge thinking and writing as though he were trapped, swinging, in a gibbet of eternally gawky adolescence. It's practically impossible to read it without hurling the book down and banging your head against a wall in sympathetic misery. Wham! What, you wonder, between impacts (wham!) ... What kind of scourging must a young man's spirit have sustained to make him sit down and write a book as scattered, as harmless, as gelded and thwarted as this one -- a book so weighted with wryness and guilt, so deeply convinced that there's something shameful and wrong with being smart, male and single? Who did this to you (wham!), Ryan Bigge? The schools? Society? That awful one with the red hair who called you a "dweeb"? The one who heckled you that one time, during class discussion, in sociology of women? Mom? Dad? Television?

The kicker (wham!) is that Ryan Bigge still accepts the terms of his oppression: Someday, he hopes, he'll find the girl who will make everything all right -- who will, by her presence, make him a whole person. She'll set down the rules and end all the in betweenness and uncertainty. She'll bring order to his life. "For Sascha, whenever I may find her," his dedication reads. Ah, well. (Wham!) Maybe "Sascha" is a book editor. And there are thousands of guys like Ryan. Nice guys. Good-looking guys (Ryan's actually kinda hot). What tha hell?

"At the Very Lonely Planet Imax theatre," Bigge writes at one point, "you can see 'Happiness' (a creepy film with a single guy whose mood is the exact opposite of the title) and 'Beauty and the Beast' (a movie in which the ugly guy successfully woos the woman). Finally, there are daily continuous showings of 'Rochelle, Rochelle,' a young woman's strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk." But here's the wacky part: "Rochelle, Rochelle" isn't a real movie at all. It's a quote from that obscure and cult-esque television program sometimes known as "Seinfeld"™.

Next page: Sex with 1,000 men -- well, not really