When Julie Burchill was asked to provide a quote for the jacket of How To Lose Friends she replied: 'I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book.' It was duly emblazoned on the front cover. I am keenly aware that by writing this article, I am giving more grist to his mill, more wordage to his website. Of course, there have been great self-publicists before - one thinks of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, the masters, or Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis - but Toby Young could well be the first Englishman to surpass them. In case by some miracle you have never heard of him, he is a 42-year-old media tart who has written two very funny books - How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, and now The Sound of No Hands Clapping - which almost make him lovable, despite his frequently loathsome behaviour.
In one of his weblog entries he admits that he looks himself up on LexisNexis every day. Young has always been known as the great self-publicist, but I had no idea what that meant before. There is also a button that says 'Do you hate Toby Young? Click here', which, of course, I did several times, but with no discernible effect. It has click here to download a free podcast of his first book, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, or click here for videos of his one-man show or any one of eight radio interviews.
It has plugs for his new play, A Right Royal Farce, and American reviews of his new book, The Sound of No Hands Clapping. Has anyone since King Cheops built a greater monument to himself? It reproduces every article he's ever written, every article ever written about him, every book review, every mention in the gossip columns. I admire Toby Young's books but it is his website, that fills me with awe.
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