The Pursuit of Pleasure
Sunday, August 8 , 2004

By PENELOPE GREEN

PETER HYMAN'S one and only attempt at a ménage à trois fizzled because  the impulse that drives one toward wildly unstructured sex with multiple partners is mostly canceled out by too much activity in the more evolved part of the brain.

Mr. Hyman is a fastidious guy with an inordinate measure of mocking self-regard — in other words, he is a writer, not a lover.

The sort of distance that makes you good as a writer usually subverts your efforts to succeed as a lover, which is why for much of the last half-decade, according to the essays collected here, Mr. Hyman finds himself bemusedly single and frequently out of work.

That is, he writes, "I had endless daylight hours to kill and an underinflated ego in dangerous need of fulfillment."

Such motivations are shared by Jayson Gallaway, whose own distance from himself is not at all great. (Mr. Hyman has dedicated his book to his parents; Mr. Gallaway, to his penis.) Oddly, this makes him a better writer.

Mr. Gallaway has less in common with his metrosexual counterpart than he does with Hunter S. Thompson. With enormous gusto for the altered state, Mr. Gallaway is also desperate for a buck and a byline — any byline — and  his pursuit of all three finds him writing reviews of adult movies  for a niche magazine called Just 18, while arguing with his editors over a rating system that features rows of cherries.

In the adventure from which the book takes its name, Mr. Gallaway, then 29, takes up the Viagra challenge only to find himself hours out of sync with his 19-year-old girlfriend, known in these pages as Lolita.

The Viagra letdown, he tells us, has three postscripts: an essay on the experience that he posts at www.salon.com; a spot on the ABC news program "20/20," as "the new face of Viagra"; and the story of a physical let-down so severe that it sends Mr. Gallaway to the hospital.

Despite Mr. Gallaway's gonzo style and proclivities, Mr. Hyman may be the braver man: his own pursuit of pleasure (and inability to walk away from a dare) finds him undergoing the extreme grooming procedure known as the full Brazilian.

In happy contrast to the multitude of chick-lit authors, Mr. Gallaway and Mr. Hyman are  hyperverbal, apparently well-read young things, able to deftly brandish words like "frottage" in simple sentences, though perhaps too vividly aware of marketing techniques and the prose style of Dave Eggers.

"Why did you pick such a trendy, time-sensitive title?" Mr. Hyman asks himself in his lengthy introduction. To sell lots of books, naturally.

Or, as Mr. Hyman writes, "It most certainly had nothing to do with an aspiration to give deeper meaning to a bit of cultural syntax that currently functions as a marketing device (metrosexuality) or to become  part of a larger discussion on the state of modern manhood."

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