If you are under 40, you probably already know of Joel Golby. He writes stream-of-consciousness personal essays and the satirical ‘Rental Opportunity of the Week’ column for Vice. For older readers, think, say, William Leith or Caitlin Moran. For even older readers, think maybe Thurber, Perelman or Dorothy Parker. And for the truly ancient, see Hazlitt?
Self-obsessed, self-vaunting, self-deprecating, self-excoriating: there is, of course, a long tradition of highly personal, witty, scratchy, sniffy essayistic writing going back to Montaigne and beyond. And we’re currently living through a Golden Age of Hot Take Navel Gazing. Sometimes it seems like every other book is a collection of sad, wry, funny reflections by some sad, wry, funny columnist. Golby is among the best.
There is a reason, of course, for all the recent blether, just the same as there was a reason for Hazlitt – technology. As Elizabeth Schneider wrote in The Aesthetics of William Hazlitt (1933):
Thanks to the rapid growth of the reading public, the development of steam printing and improved facilities of distribution, magazines multiplied […] and became appreciably larger; and this condition, with the consequent demand of editors for more, and for more original, material, gave the essayist licence to ramble as never before.
If the printing press gave essayists the licence to ramble, then the internet has seemingly made it compulsory for all: everyone now has in their pocket the means of production and distribution.
But in order to rise above the incessant sound of the burbling masses and monetise the musings – to get your column in Vice, say – you still need to have something special to mark you out, some kind of shtick. Golby’s thing is his obsession with the minutiae of everyday life, and the simple fact that he’s very funny, which certainly helps.
Like his previous collection of ramblings, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant (2019), Four Stars veers wildly between the utterly stupid and the completely profound. How could it not? It’s like tuning into the random, heedless thoughts of anyone else, if only they could write.
Some of the stuff is perhaps just a little too easy and silly. His ‘killing a plant’ piece isn’t great, and you get the feeling you’ve heard it before:
When you consider that we are all just animals – know we have evolved beyond that slightly and that there are a few things that separate us now from the beasts (language; an up-to-date iPhone), but fundamentally we are just naked, hairy creatures made of flesh – we should be good at looking after plants.
But then some of the stuff’s simply fantastic: ‘The Entire Decades-Long Television Output of Rick Stein’ is worthy of Clive James at his best:
The beauty of Rick is just watching as a man grows ever-so-slightly day-drunk and pinkly-sunburned in a wardrobe that can only be aesthetically described as ‘the flight crew lost your dad’s luggage so he had to buy all his clothes at the airport’… He breathes the clean crisp air of the coastline and tells you a story about when he read a book when he was 20. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It’s 9 p.m. and he’s eyeing up the day’s third bottle of wine.
The conceit in Four Stars is that Golby is reviewing his entire life, from sex to shopping to drinking, and giving his various experiences a star rating. Thus, in a very funny short piece about eating an almond croissant, for example, he awards the almond croissant ‘100 stars’, while the ordeal of ‘Being Trapped In A Toilet in Spitalfields Market And Like 16 People Watching Me Come Out Once They Finally Got The Door Down’ receives zero. It’s certainly a convenient means of threading a lot of random observations together. These include Golby’s reflections on the inexorable rise of the Chicken Big Mac (five stars), playing Football Manager (five stars) and the domestication of pornography: ‘In two texts I can direct someone to go to the work bathroom, pull their shirt up and their pants down and see a flash of WhatsApp nipple within six minutes’ (five million stars).
The star ratings all seem a bit unnecessary until you begin to realise that Golby is in fact trying to gee himself up a bit and talk himself out of a downward spiral of depression and despair. ‘So, in review, life is OK. Life is good, even. Life is magical, at its best (at its worst: agony).’ In the end, he gives life four stars. Which seems a bit mean. Four Stars? Five stars.
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