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How Toby fell flat on his face - November 24th 2001

This story of social mishap lacks the spontaneity of a comedy of bad manners, argues Will Cohu

I have a feeling that I'm the only reviewer of this book not to know the author, but at least that gives me a reason not to dislike him. According to Young, everyone hates him, even his friends. As a student he suffered from "negative charisma" and had only to walk across a room to make enemies. After closing The Modern Review - which caused a lasting rift with his friend and co-editor Julie Burchill - he went off to work for Vanity Fair, made new enemies in the New World, and came back with enough grisly experiences to make a book about how horrible New Yorkers can be.

Young didn't set out to be hated: he was in love with America. Though his background was "educated bourgeoisie" and he went to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, he wanted to drown in the lowbrow and live the crassest life imaginable. "My idea of heaven," he writes, "was being able to roll around naked in a huge pile of money with Anna Nicole Smith without feeling the slightest pang of conscience."

Toby never went to heaven, but he did make it into a number of bars, parties and beds - and was thrown out of most of them - before being sacked. By his own account he was greedy, pushy and cynical, a balding hack on the make. (The bass line of the book is holistic ugliness.) But what really seem to have put people off is his desire to be loved, especially by the celebrities. "Leave the celebrities alone," shouted Graydon Carter, his editor. But Toby couldn't help himself. He went weak at the sight of a star. He suffered from the agony of fantasised intimacy with people who cared nothing about him. Blagging his way into parties, he wandered drunkenly through a world in which "I know everyone but no one knows me." He despised the celebrity culture and the "quisling" journalists paid off by PRs to perpetuate the fraud, but still he hated peering through the window rather than being inside the room with the beautiful people. "I liked popcorn movies," he writes. "My favourite actors were Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger." He salivated over every juvenile model he met.

Much of How To Lose Friends... is devoted to the excesses of Vanity Fair and the "Condé Nasties". It ought to be funny, but I felt I'd read it all before, and if I hadn't I didn't care. It's no surprise to read the New York society is rich, snobbish and trivial, or that "in the course of 'styling' photo shoots, the fashionistas run up huge bills for all sorts of goodies they claim are absolutely essential if the story in question is to 'work'". That side of the book is gossipy without being revelatory. Then there are the set pieces, which leave Toby flat on his face but also show how stuck-up his hosts are. Among other gaffes, he invited a strippergram into the Vanity Fair offices on "Bring Your Daughters to Work Day". He is a stuntman, not a real blunderer, and the stories lack the spontaneity that make for comedy of bad manners.

What's most compelling about the book is Young's character. I ended up regarding him with the same fascination and loathing that he has for himself, though possibly not with the same optimism. At the heart is a confusion of values, an offshoot of the Modern Review approach of applying highbrow talents to lowbrow subject matter. Young doesn't know what is significant of not about his tastes, his world. He thinks deep but loves cheap, and vice versa, and his loves are condemned by the relativism of his values.

By the end of the book he's broke, but in love, older and wiser, and he has ditched the whisky for a volume of Alexis de Tocqueville. This plot reads like an imposed moral structure, an apology for not producing something more substantial: this is the screenplay I never wrote, the novel I never finished, the cultural essays I never took seriously. This is my life: pathetic, isn't it?