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Say this for Toby Young: The enfant terrible of British journalism might desperately crave the admiration of the entertainment elites on both American coasts, but he gives his wife the funniest jokes in his new memoir. And they all come at his expense.
The Sound of No Hands Clapping is Young's follow-up to the daring and hilarious How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, his story of continuously failing upward in the glossy-magazine trade. His misadventures always ended with getting canned, but Young got the last laugh when his chronicle of failure became a best seller.
Young's naked longing made How to Lose Friends an irresistible read. He may have considered the magazines trivial, but he wanted nothing more than to be part of them, anyway. Instead, he set his bridges aflame and gossiped about editors, especially Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. That assured he would never eat lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria again, and, despite the self-deprecating humor, you knew he took this as a personal tragedy.
The Sound of No Hands Clapping could use more pompous anti-heroes like Carter. It opens with a big-shot Hollywood mogul seeking out Young to write a screenplay after admiring his endearing-jerk persona in the first memoir. But No Hands Clapping doesn't even manage to be How to Lose Friends, L.A.-style. For one thing, Young never names the studio head or almost everyone else he works with in Hollywood, so there's none of the delicious insider dish you'd expect.
When Young focuses on his L.A. story, he can still carry whole chapters just on the basis of his needy, neurotic, scheming, procrastinating persona.
Unfortunately, he also can abandon the story line for chapters at a time. His tangents include a banal minute-by-minute account of the birth of his first child, painfully long retellings of wedding toasts that fell understandably flat, long-running jokes about his resemblance to someone who led the British opposition party in the '90s, and a padded story about attending a screenwriting seminar.
It's not easy to pull off the endearing-jerk persona in one memoir, let alone two. Young simply doesn't have the material to do it again.
What might have been a great book -- Toby Young set loose in Hollywood -- gets lost amid unrelated moments that inspire only winces.
The Sound of No Hands Clapping
By Toby Young
Da Capo, 264 pp., $24.95
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