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Reviewed by DAVID COHEN

Media encounters can be dodgy affairs. About 10 years ago, for example, during a visit to London, I joined the British journalist Toby Young and his then inseparable chum, Fleet Street's enfant terrible Julie Burchill, for an alcohol-soaked dinner at the city's fashionable Groucho Club. The upstairs meeting happened shortly after the launch of their small pop cultural monthly, the Modern Review, edited by Young and bankrolled by La Burchill.

They seemed like nice enough people. But I couldn't help but be struck by how monotonously self referential much of the chatter was, especially as the evening wore on and various hangers-on, including Julie's soon-to-be-ex husband Cosmo Landesman, came over to the table and paid homage to Soho's dandiest pair of relentless self-promoters.

A decade on, Toby Young probably empathises a bit more with how a visiting antipodean was once made to feel - or so he indicates in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, his newly published memoir of the past six years. In 1995, his working relationship with Burchill having turned unexpectedly sour, Young folded the Modern Review and lit out for a job in New York as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. As Young tells it, he arrived in the Apple determined to take the town by storm. He wanted to soak up what he rather oddly imagined to be Vanity Fair's oh-so-brazen intellectual culture (had somebody not told him that it's been a while since Dorothy Parker stopped writing for the magazine?) but instead found himself relegated to the fringes, alone and unloved amid the, er, monotonously self referential chatter of that town's own relentlessly self-promoting media dandies.

Within two years, he had been fired, in disgrace, from Vanity Fair. Worse, in Manhattan terms, he also found himself banned from one of the city's trendiest bars soon afterwards. Throughout it all, and this is what appears to have particularly stung the now 38-year-old author, he failed to score a single decent date, save one occasion involving a purported woman who on

closer inspection wasn't quite all she first appeared to be, the hilarious details of which are probably best left for readers of this frequently enjoyable book to discover for themselves - as well as his genuinely touching love affair at the end with an English girl named Caroline. Be sure to check out his marvellous barside encounter with the actor Jim Carrey while you're at it.

Lively though much of his storytelling undoubtedly is, however, the suspicion lingers from time to time that a good number of the shared incidents are just too neat and tidy detail-wise. A tad varnished, perhaps? In fact, Young more or less admits to the charge, writing in his foreword that "you'd be surprised by how little exaggeration and embellishment there is" in his book.

That admission is made in the voice to be found throughout much of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, in which the author self deprecatingly casts himself as a scallywag but an honest and likeable one. It's is a fairly well-worn gambit, of course, used to its best effect in the past by embittered rock journalist Tony Tyler, in his savage 1984 memoir I Hate Rock And Roll. Somewhat less alluring on this outing are the author's many, many sombre footnotes drawing on the revolutionary sages of Americanism, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, whom Young presumably studied during his pre-Modern Review years as a student at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford universities. Although the intended effect appears to be ironic, the overall conceit seems to serve no better purpose than reminding readers that, likeable scallywag or no, this Groucho Club émigré really is a pampered young ass who probably richly deserved the six on the bags administered to him by New York's hippest.

David Cohen is a Wellington-based journalist.