THEY CALL ME NAUGHTY LOLA :Personal Ads From The London Review of Books.

For some of us, self-deprecation is the olive in the martini of romance. It’s that little something extra — a blast of salt and texture in a pool of cool velvet. The practice of demoting oneself has a counterintuitive power: it takes a truly secure person to self-flagellate. But in “They Call Me Naughty Lola,” a highly jaunty collection of personal ads from The London Review of Books, the intense self-deprecation among lovelorn Brits is less like an olive resting comfortably at the bottom of a martini glass and more like a peacock that has set itself on fire to flag down passing motorists. One ad runs, “Official greeter and face of Dalkeith Cheese Festival, 1974, seeks woman to 50 who is no stranger to failure, debt-consolidating mortgages and wool.” Another states: “Your buying me dinner doesn’t mean I’ll have sex with you. I probably will have sex with you though.” A third comes from the pen of a woman able to “start fires with the power of her premenstrual tension.”

When the benchmark for self-flagellation is set this high, several interesting things happen. Even the rare instances of self-puffery take on a dark or twisted aspect. (“Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth.”) The deprecation sometimes starts to cover an area larger than the self. (“I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out and covered in too much tahini.”) Finally, some of the ads become self-referential and meta (“How can I follow that? Man, 47. Gives up easily. Box No. 9547.”), if not outright jokes. (“117-year-old male Norfolk Viagra bootlegger finally in the mood for a bit of young totty.”) In his introduction, David Rose, the advertising director who assembled the collection, addresses this last tendency when he writes that “for some LRB advertisers, meeting a partner is no longer even the main objective of placing a personal ad. ...They’re a frolic, a bit of whimsy. ...The silliness, in this sense, becomes a sleight of hand, a trick done with mirrors to disguise the machinery beneath the stage.”

Indeed, the tricksy nature of this collection, despite its laugh-out-loud gems, is perhaps what keeps these ads from engaging us emotionally or getting under our skin. (For a more affecting if less amusing look at a similar topic, see Sara Bader’s 2005 book on classified ads throughout America’s history, “Strange Red Cow,” which includes items like this one from an 1865 issue of The New York Herald: “J.A.R. — Sarcasm and indifference have driven me from you. I sail in next steamer for Europe. Shall I purchase tickets for two, or do you prefer to remain to wound some other loving heart? Answer quick, or all is lost. Emelie.”)

Given that loneliness and the search for love can be two of life’s most heartstring-pulling topics, you’d ideally finish a collection like this feeling slightly disquieted. But in the end, these ads are probably more effective as literary style exercises than as portraits of longing. Note, for instance, the pitch-perfect genre parody at work in “Blah, blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write. Box No. 3253. Like I care.” I wanted to.