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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Thus a gig at the magazine is clearly a dream for our author. In 1995, he writes, Graydon Carter invited him to come to New York for a trial period as a Vanity Fair contributing editor. What comes next will be familiar to anyone who has ever entertained notions of anti-patriotic universalism only to feel fuel-injected with national identity upon traveling abroad. Arriving in the capital of the American values he rebelliously championed in Britain, Young is gradually suffused by continental horror. He had believed that alienation from mainstream culture was tired, but that idea was partly responsible for the death of bohemia in the '90s, which Young quickly learns to mourn.
Of course, part of Young's turnabout is spurred by humiliation resulting from many foiled attempts at social ascendance, and he knows there's a danger that his whole book will seem like sour grapes. At one point, he tells his far more successful friend Alex that he wishes he'd made it to the top so "I could condemn it more convincingly."
His failure isn't even a result of any kind of cynicism or intellectual superiority. Besides making idiotic if hilarious gaffes -- like hiring a stripper to come to the office on "Take Our Daughters to Work Day -- Young sometimes demonstrates a bizarre cluelessness that makes one wonder what Carter ever saw in him. The rejected pitches he reproduces might be intended to demonstrate Vanity Fair's priggishness, but all they really show is that Young's sense of humor is less Evelyn Waugh than Benny Hill.
One query says, "How hard is it in this day and age to become a social pariah? Why don't I try and find out. The idea would be to antagonize as many people as possible by indulging in various forms of anti-social behavior in a twenty-four-hour period." Such a project might have exposed the minute, byzantine rules governing New York social life, but only if it was done with a degree of subtlety. Young's ideas were crude and blundering -- he proposed to crack open a Budweiser at an AA meeting, let his pager and cellphone ring during a play and smoke a cigar at a health food restaurant. Such stunts would have proved nothing save that people disapprove of extreme rudeness.
Nor does his book as a whole demonstrate the kind of scintillating insouciance that he seems to believe New York editors failed to appreciate in him. His imitations of what he annoyingly calls the "glossy posse" feel strictly secondhand, often involving use of the word "dahling." He makes the same references -- to Dorothy Parker, the Algonquin Round Table and the newspapermen of '40s films -- over and over again. He insists on using stupid names for cocaine like "devil's dandruff" and "Bolivian marching powder."
That said, he's an immensely sympathetic narrator in large part because he's so inept and, in a strange way, so naive. Despite his initial craven enthusiasm for American corporate media, he had absolutely no idea what it really meant. He can't seem to get over the idea that contemporary newsrooms don't resemble the one in "His Girl Friday."
"The old-fashioned New York journalist, a harum-scarum roustabout whose status is 'somewhere between a whore and a bartender,' has been replaced by a clean and sober careerist with a summer house in the Hamptons," he laments. It's as if an eager B-school grad went to work for Enron only to be shocked when Ken Lay turned out not to be a benign social benefactor.
That innocence works for the book, making it a kind of parable of the American media world during the last six or seven years, with all its market-driven credulousness, slavering celebrity obsession and smug sense of entitlement. Young's insight is about the way the American myth of total class mobility and equal, endless opportunity -- apotheosized in the anointing of the famous -- justifies "abhorrent levels of inequality" and ensures that anyone who's not materially successful will be viewed as defective. "The casual, unthinking cruelty with which successful New Yorkers treat cab drivers and waiters, not to mention their personal assistants, was something I witnessed every day," he writes. "In contemporary Manhattan, the concept of 'the deserving poor' is an oxymoron."
In escaping this world, Young achieves a kind of salvation -- and not just by writing a book that was a bestseller in England. He marries the lovely Caroline, an English law student with no patience for the world of Vanity Fair. His experience with the ugly side of beautiful people disabuses him of his affection for shallowness.
Many people, including Graydon Carter, briefly thought that Sept. 11 would do something similar for America as a whole. They turned out to be utterly wrong, but the momentary hope revealed that it's not just incorrigibles like Young who long for something better than the breathless mainstream sideshow culture. Celebrity worship may never go out of style, but perhaps alienation is coming back in.
