Enemy of the State: The Life of Erwin Knoll Book

Toby Young's second, equally brilliantly titled memoir, starts off after How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has got into print. It happens to catch the eye of a Hollywood producer who offers him a crack at adapting a biography about a self-destructive '70s-era record producer into a screenplay for a movie he wants to make, while a a different set of producers comes around to talk about making his first book into a movie. Once again, he's in America going after the Big Time, albeit on the West coast rather than the East.

It would be a mistake to approach this book as Toby's Big Hollywood Adventure, however. No Hands Clapping is really a chronicle of his life after the events of the previous book, with his screenwriting experiences just the connecting thread running through the narrative.

Toby still has ambitions, but the fire's not as hot as when he hopped across the Atlantic to work for Graydon Carter. The tensions and conflicts that did so much to make the original book interesting for me - the contrast between his intelligence and education and his starstruck hunger for glamour, his frustrated lust for the good life, the clash between his rather shallow goals and his parents' accomplishments and values - are far less in evidence here, having largely run their course the last time around. Toby's settling down at the end of the last book is a significant part of that, and as might be guessed, his life as a "whipped" (but mostly content) boyfriend, husband and father coping with domestic and mid-life crises is rather less entertaining than his earlier laddishness. He's still quite good at "losing friends and alienating people," but he seems to be enjoying the role a bit too much.

The result is that this all seems more like an anticlimax to the history that made him an "icon of defeat" rather than a fully satisfactory follow-up. Still, there were some of the funny bits and worthwhile insights that helped make the first book memorable.