Booklist needed. Can you help?

I'm not sure if this will be helpful at all, so if not, please simply ignore, but this reminds me a whole lot about a popular tv show. It's called How I Met Your Mother and is pretty popular in the US. There are 5 mcs, and one of them is this guy Barney. He thinks he is really just God's gift to women and he sleeps with a different girl every night. It's a sitcom, so not particularly serious, but when I read your post, he was all I could think of. It's a really great show, at least imo, and if you're up for storytelling in ways that aren't literary, it might help you out.

The Backward OX said:

I’m considering writing a novel which, amongst other things, will contain certain similarities to The History of Tom Jones. These similarities are mostly that my Main Character will become superficially involved with a number of women.

One of the ways in which my story will differ from Tom Jones is in the type of personality my MC will portray.

One way to explain this might be to ask you to consider the personalities of Forrest Gump, or Raymond Babbitt in Rainman, or John Elder Robison in his autobiography Look Me in the Eye.

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They're nothing alike. You've got a man with a cognitive impairment and savant skills, a highly intelligent man with autism and very few self-help skills, and a highly intelligent man with Aspergers.

You're not really going to find much in the way of novels with characters on the autism spectrum being "involved with a number of women". Mostly because autism in used in literature as shorthand for being socially distant or incompetent. (And if we're talking cognitively impaired characters, that's usually used as shorthand for helplessness or perceived helplessness.) I find that if the fictional character on the autism spectrum manages to deal with a single romance in a semi-competent manner, it's a victory. For that, I could suggest:

Harmonic Feedback (it's a chick but still)
Marcelo In The Real World (fake Aspergers)
Born On A Blue Day (nonfic)
Mindblind
Come Fall

"Forrest Gump as a The Man Who Loved Women" - That's how I would pitch the idea you have outlined as a movie.

"An idiot savant with the magical gift of being irresistible to women, bounces from encounter to encounter with famous women through history."

It actually sounds just cheezy enough to be a summer hit.

And no, I can't think of a novel that fits that exact description. Although there is a vague memory of a psuedo sci-fi action erotica from my youth, a character by the name of "Johnathan Relevant" - a quick google turns up this.

http://www.spyguysandgals.com/sgShowChar.asp?ScanName=Relevant_Jonathan

I seem to recall that this person would 'become' whatever sexual fantasy that the opposite character desired. Think of "Quantum Leap" - with a lot more sex.


Good luck