Toby Young- The Sound of No Hands Clapping

The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Toby Young

2006

Over a year ago back in February 2013 I read and reviewed long-standing English journalist Toby Young's first novel How To Lose Friends and Alienate People as an example of some lightweight non-fiction, offering a few laughs alongside copious amounts of gossip regarding the strange world Young encounters as he desperately tries to make his name writing in the US. Later adapted into a film starring Simon Pegg (which I just can't sum up the enthusiasm to watch), the book became an unexpected best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, as it documented Young's employment as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and his inevitable falling out with absolutely everybody. It's a decent book, written by an author who's very comfortable using his particular languid, conversational prose style, and he does a good job establishing himself as a (mildly) lovable loser who always messes things up for himself. It does, however, lose a lot of steam the more it continues on.

It was really just a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness that led me to read the sequel. I found The Sound of No Hands Clapping in a second-hand bookshop, and it sat on the to-read pile for about a year before I very nearly decided to abandon my plan to read it, and give it back to the charity shop. My expectations weren't high, since the hook of the book didn't seem that interesting, and also because in my experience follow-up memoirs from media-types are usually quick cash-ins lacking the heart and the purpose of the originals. The basis of No Hands Clapping is Toby's immediate future following the release of his last book, and his decision to seek his fortune as a Hollywood screenwriter, following a couple of opportunities from both the adaptation of his first book, and a random from an offer from an unnamed Hollywood bigwig to write a bio-pic.

The handsome visage of Toby Young

On the surface this does seem to offer up the potential for some Hollywood insight, but ultimately (spoiler alert), what we get is two-hundred and fifty pages-plus of Toby completely failing to gain any sort of foothold in Tinseltown whatsoever. In hindsight it's almost completely baffling to me how badly planned this book must have been, something that's completely evident in the lack of structure, adventure or character development. I know this is a piece of non-fiction but it's appeal is completely based upon the success and entertainment of Young's first book, which was a much fuller, well-organised narrative that did have some of those things (though not in abundance); but then that book also had the advantage of covering a wider time period in a more interesting set-up. The Sound of No Hands Clapping has none of the advantages of a set-up as interesting as working for magazine publishing dynasty Condé Nast. Instead it's just Toby Young and his long-suffering wife living back in England, snatching at show-business tit-bits, embarrassing in a far crueler way than his hi-jinks of the past.

It's almost as if this book was a back-up plan for Young in the event that his screenwriting career might somehow not take-off, and that as a result he didn't have the foresight to apply himself to settings and situations that might make his book more interesting. The meetings with the mysterious Hollywood bigwig are genuinely interesting, as are other conversations with people in that game, but there's just not enough of it. Instead there's plenty of stuff about Toby Young and his wife, the vast majority of it cloaked in that godawful British tabloid sens of humour where acting like a misogynist is apparently okay if it's self-aware behaviour. Young goes into great detail about his family, which (really boring spoiler alert) grows by two babies during the course of everything else. That's nice and everything, but it's as boring as hell since by this point Toby Young is nowhere near endearing or established enough as a character for me to possibly care. It felt like I was reading some bizarre mixture of Tony Parsons (probably the most boring, pointless author I've ever read, author of Man and Boy amongst other crap) and Jeremy Clarkson, playing a good-old politically incorrect British rugby club bore. These segments killed the book stone dead for me, and as they became more and more prevalent further on, the less and less interested I became, to the point where I was racing through it just to put it down afterwards.

So yes, The Sound of No Hands Clapping is a worthless book; I gave it one star out of five on Goodreads. But at the same time it did have some potential; Young's style is assured and he seemed to have a gateway into a world that would give him some fantastic content, but instead he completely choked on his opportunities and ended up writing about his wife getting pregnant twice. Good for him, but not something that hasn't happened to a few other billion people on this planet.