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Most friendship is feigning...

Ah, the friends and family issue of Quest - what could be more appropriate, we ask ourselves, than a review of Toby Young's How To Lose Friends And Alienate People? His book is a hilarious saga of the tragicomic adventures of this brilliantly funny yet erudite Briton who comes to New York to achieve fame and fortune in the glossy magazine trade, with a sideline ambition of taking the city's legendarily glamorous nightlife by storm.

For starters, Toby Young is one of the funniest writers at work today, and one of the most entertaining composers of anecdotal humour since John Aubrey, who invented the genre in the 17th century. Yet there is a depth to this work that will bring to the minds of readers with a literary bent George Orwell's Down And Out In London And Paris and Dylan Thomas's Adventures In The Skin Trade. Until now, Young has been a journalist, best known to Americans, perhaps, as a columnist in the Spectator and in Taki's "Top Drawer" section of the New York Press. This is his first book.

After an academic career that included a first-class degree from Oxford, a year of study on a Fulbright Award to Harvard (where, at the same time, he was a teaching fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and work toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge, Young became a founder of the Modern Review, a magazine devoted to criticism of popular culture: "Smart writers on dumb things." His co-editor was the equally brilliant Julie Burchill, one of the most famous journalists in Britain, with a reputation as a "ferocious attack dog".

The magazine was put together in Young's one-room "bed-sit" in Shepherd's Bush. The first issue, he relates, was printed in the middle of the night, without permission, on the presses of a newspaper owned by publishing baron Robert Maxwell. True to form, Young insisted on including Maxwell in the list of people thanked on the contents page, and act of mischief that sparked a lawsuit. "Maxwell completely lost it when he saw this, claiming it was like burglars leaving a calling card," he recalls.

After four years, in early 1995, the review folded as a result of a clash in the "editorial suite" - a feud that exploded in the pages of the English press. As an indication of the journalistic stature of the combatants, it was estimated that the news of the Burchill-Young breakup generated on a single day 1,705 column inches, or 48 yards, second only to Bosnia.

Young and Burchill were now no longer on speaking terms. At the time of the breakup, Burchill squealed (her word) to the London Times, "Toby Young has no future here! He'll have to leave the country, like everyone else who falls out with me."

As luck would have it, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, telephoned, offering him an appealing exile - a trial period with his magazine in New York.

At the age of 31, Toby Young was looking forward to an excellent adventure in America, working for Vanity Fair - the world's leading general-interest magazine with an editorial budget three or four times that of any of its rivals. Other talented writers from abroad had made it in this country. Young recalled the telegram that Herman Mankiewitz sent in 1925 to Ben Hecht, inviting him to write screenplays in Hollywood: MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS.

However, Young's disillusionment began before he even touched American soil. Arriving by air on the evening of July 4, 1995, he was unaware that it was Independence Day in the U.S. Looking out from the descending aircraft, he saw the dusky Manhattan skyline sparkling with fireworks. "It's true what they say," he murmured to his American seatmate, "you really are a welcoming people."

He got this reply: "Don'tcha know what's happening here? We're celebrating the fact that we got rid of you people 200 years ago."

That was just the beginning. Told to dress "casual", Young showed up at the Madison Avenue Condé Nast offices of Vanity Fair in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a nice literary allusion: a reproduction of a Modern Review cover of a bare-chested Keanu Reeves and the banner: "Young, Dumb and Full of Come." He was surprised to be sent up the freight elevator to the package-delivery window. When he was eventually presented to the elegant, Savile Row-tailored, Jermyn Street-shirted Graydon Carter, the scene was right out of a Bateman cartoon, but with some of the editor's apparently customary profanity added: "What the f are you wearing? You look like you're ina grunge band."

Minor stuff to Young, but apparently not to Carter. They did not hit it off. Young arrived via the delivery entrance, and despite being listed on the masthead as a contributing editor, he more or less never rose above messenger-boy status at Vanity Fair. He eventually left the magazine, by agreement of all parties, before the end of two years.

Young retaliated in book form, not only against Vanity Fair but also against New York society in general. His book documents his series of adventures both in the office (he hired a stripper on "Bring Your Daughter to Work" day) and outside it, with tales ranging from his battles with nightclub "clipboard Nazis" to his attempts to figure out New York women (from Park Avenue princesses to Condé Nasties) and other members of the "glossy posse."

There is epiphany and redemption at the book's end, when Toby finally gives the finger (or two fingers, as the British are wont) to America and returns to England. Like the 19th century de Tocqueville, whom Young quotes often, the author gives a fresh and intelligently critical view of America as seen through foreign eyes.

There is no index in this British edition, which can be ordered from www.amazon.co.uk. Perhaps there will be one in the American edition, to be published (appropriately) on July 4, 2002, by Da Capo press - which sounds like the right kind of ally to have when the book comes out in New York and the solids start to hit the HVAC. You will not want to miss what Young has to say about some of New York's major glitterati and fashionista figures.

Six years after the infamous feud, when asked for a blurb for How To Lose Friends..., Julie Burchill replied, "I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book," which, of course, Young put right on the cover. Yet in her Spectator* review, she wrote, "This is the funniest, cleverest, most touching new book I've read for as long as I can remember."

May one assume that they are speaking again?

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE BY TOBY YOUNG, PUBLISHED BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, NOVEMBER 2001, £9.99