Abacus £11.99 pp279

The doyen of Loser Lit is back, as bumptious, sometimes plain obnoxious and excruciatingly embarrassing as ever. And still very, very funny. This is a real feat, because in this follow-up to How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (early working title, Awaken the Dwarf Within), he isn’t quite such a failure as before. He has written a bestseller, for one thing; and for another, he has become a father, which, aside from becoming a mother, must rank as one of life’s greatest achievements, although, as he points out, it’s really very easy to do. “Even animals have been known to pull it off. You might as well congratulate someone for managing to use the lavatory.” And he has hung on to his job as theatre critic of The Spectator, something I’m keenly aware of as he’s always barging in front of me on press nights to get his free glass of wine during the interval. I usually just reach over the top of him.

The main plot development here is an absolute gift: Toby Goes to Hollywood. Some bigshot producer (his name carefully blanked out) picked up a copy of How to Lose Friends on somebody’s yacht, and liked it so much he decided Young should write a screenplay for him. Any English writer being picked up by Hollywood knows he’s on to a good thing. Not because what he writes will ever come to anything — it won’t, plus he will have a grotesquely horrible and humiliating time of it. But it will all make excellent copy.

Humiliation follows hard on the heels of humiliation, pause upon dry-mouthed, perspiring, agonised pause. Young rushes around town, parties frantically, pushes himself forward, makes enemies, disgraces himself, and finally ends up with the producer who initially hired him wrenching at the locked door of the car Young is cowering in, screaming, “YOU’RE DEAD. DO YOU HEAR ME? DEAD.” How we laugh.

There’s no getting round the brashness and egomania, the boasting about a girlfriend “I’d briefly shared with Mick Jagger”. Young talks about “fame and celebrity” in a single breathless breath, as if they’re the same thing, both to be measured essentially by telly exposure. He confesses to his own “longstanding desire for fame”. No, Toby: celebrity. What you want is celebrity. You notice that everything he does, everyone he meets, every book he reads, is in some way connected to himself and his “career”. He even seems to read Martin Amis primarily for career advice, and claims an encyclopaedic knowledge of his literary hero. (How Amis feels about having Young as his number one fan is not recorded.) You can be certain he’s never going to develop a passionate enthusiasm for, say, bird-watching. It wouldn’t advance him in the meedjah. But he will do absolutely anything for publicity and self-advertisement, whether it’s inviting Quentin Tarantino to his LA book launch (he doesn’t come), or posing naked for the New York Observer. Young makes Christine Hamilton look like Thomas Pynchon.

But you can tolerate a lot, because he does make you laugh out loud. My favourite sequence, apart from the Hollywood ones, is his loutish best man’s speech, which he recalls in loving detail (his recall of convincing dialogue is exceptionally good). This had me not only curling my toes but squirming my entire feet in agonies of vicarious embarrassment for the twit. The bride’s mother was German, so: “Lady Cutler, you mustn’t think of yourself as losing a daughter so much as gaining the Sudetenland.”

He may be fascinated by himself, but he’s also pretty interested in other people, which means there are plenty of good anecdotes here as well. As Young reminds us, for instance, the youthful Boris Johnson not only once said that his ambition was to become president of the USA, but was actually born in New York. So it could happen.Graham Greene said that he found failure so much more interesting than success, but, as Young triumphantly demonstrates, it’s also much, much funnier.

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