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Golk: A Novel
“The first really good book I have read about television.” —Norman Mailer
In midcentury America, one man is determined to take over the airwaves with a program as audacious as it is entertaining. Bald, bombastic, and irresistible, Golk is his name and You’re On Camera is his show. To “golk” someone is to trick her, on camera, into betraying her true nature. The more combative the personality, the better the joke, and to help trap his victims Golk enlists a team of misfits, including Herbert Hondorp, a scholarly layabout turned photogenic decoy, and Jeanine Hendricks, a twenty-three-old debutante with a bitter worldview.
But Golk has bigger plans than just catching average Manhattanites unawares. As popular as You’re On Camera has become, he knows the show is capable of making a greater, more transformative impact. The question is, will Herbert and Hendricks go along with his revolutionary agenda? Or will they bow to the power of the network and the seduction of celebrity?
Combining high drama with surreal hilarity and presenting a remarkably prescient view of the future of television, Golk ranks with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust as one of the finest novels ever written about the American entertainment industry.
In midcentury America, one man is determined to take over the airwaves with a program as audacious as it is entertaining. Bald, bombastic, and irresistible, Golk is his name and You’re On Camera is his show. To “golk” someone is to trick her, on camera, into betraying her true nature. The more combative the personality, the better the joke, and to help trap his victims Golk enlists a team of misfits, including Herbert Hondorp, a scholarly layabout turned photogenic decoy, and Jeanine Hendricks, a twenty-three-old debutante with a bitter worldview.
But Golk has bigger plans than just catching average Manhattanites unawares. As popular as You’re On Camera has become, he knows the show is capable of making a greater, more transformative impact. The question is, will Herbert and Hendricks go along with his revolutionary agenda? Or will they bow to the power of the network and the seduction of celebrity?
Combining high drama with surreal hilarity and presenting a remarkably prescient view of the future of television, Golk ranks with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust as one of the finest novels ever written about the American entertainment industry.
217 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1960
6 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 16, 2013
I read this right after reading Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. It's another excellent New York novel. Its protagonist is equally clueless, although he learns, and he is equally taken under the wing of a strange guy who tries to be mythic and always the smartest guy in the room. Both novels are about what is real, both in art and in relationships, and both get into manufacturing reality through the latest media. And both are excellent.
October 25, 2015
This short novel puzzled and intrigued me at the same time. It left me puzzled because I kept believing that there was something about the nature of television’s intrusiveness and ubiquity as entertainment that was essential to the story, that the satire was deeper and more profound, pointing to some major shift in contemporary society. And while it’s possible to see that Hondorp’s character was warped by television, is it the novelist’s intent to suggest that the instance is endemic…?
Television has little to do initially with the portrait that Stern paints of his central protagonist, the 38-year-old perpetual student Hondorp, whose life at the novel’s start consists only of roaming the streets of New York, observing, mingling with people, passing time till he can go home to his father’s apartment in Manhattan—where, after dinner, he reads, and his father languishes in front of the tv till he sleeps—and then begin again his aimless routine all over the next day.
One day Hondorp visits a bookstore and finds himself golked, which in turn leads him to execute a golk, then to become a golk. Golk himself, about whom so many in this novel revolve, is the mastermind behind the hidden camera expose, which he uses to entrap people into behaving naturally in slightly extraordinary circumstances. The concept has its extra-novel correlate in Alan Funt’s Candid Camera, a radio, then television show, which in several incarnations, prevailed on television for forty years, now displaced by the likes of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and the plethora of youtube offerings. Golk is a self-made man, born with the surname Pomeroy in Rhode Island, but when he gravitated to New York after the second world war, he remade himself and devised his métier.
At the juncture Golk has snared Hondorp, the show is about to get picked up for national distribution on one of the major networks. When it is, the show is immediately popular, and Hondorp’s life also begins to take off. He is drawn to Elaine Hendricks, a mid-20-ish divorcee who comes from money, and whose peripatetic past included a wealthy and abusive husband. Hondorp and Hendricks are both golks, and they are principally in charge of producing the golks. Golk’s ambitions are to take his show to heights of revelation, where he uncovers the seedier workings of the powerful, the movers and shakers who control people’s lives, to bring them down to size and make them seem no more than the common man, if not worse. After executing a few of these larger golks, which result in lawsuits and reduced ratings, Golk is gently ousted from his role as the show’s lead, and Hondorp and Hendricks happily take the reins in his place.
Hondorp and Hendricks cavalierly decide to marry after they have successfully scaled back the show to the network’s satisfaction. Interlarded in the romance of Hondorp and Hendricks are a couple of scenes of Golk on the skids, unsure of where he might go and what he might do, initially resentful and upset, then resigned. Several months later Hondorp and Hendricks begin to receive random, intermittent postcards from Golk, which both pique curiosity and guilt. When Hondorp’s father dies, Hendricks only hears about it after the funeral, and she takes this as signal that Hondorp has gone beyond the pale, that he is dead emotionally. They break up, the show is canceled and replaced, the golks all disperse, and after Hondorp has spent six months in Chicago as a late night dj, he visits LA looking for a job and sees Golk, high atop some stage set. They salute one another from afar, but Hondorp is quickly back on his way to Chicago, certain that he will never aspire to anything again.
The novel has quietly skewered and roasted out of Hondorp whatever life juices he might have had. It’s painful witnessing his descent into non-feeling, non-being, and non-participation. Golk has made—a late postcard explains that “golk” means “fool”—of all those around him fools, those whom he used, and those whom he exploited. People were willing to become golks, for it was an entrée into celebrity, an exalted realm above the activities of the mere scrabblers in life. I’m not certain that Stern was working out this formulation about the numbing and deadening qualities of too-pervasive television and the false intimacy of celebrity, but it seems to pertain. To generalize from the particulars of Hondorp’s singularity—to make of him a type or an everyman—is probably not Stern’s intention, at least not in such bald terms. There are shades of “The Great Gatsby” here—Holdorp as Nick and Golk as Gatsby—and the conclusions of each have the same wistful desperation.
Stern’s writing is fast-paced, wry, and very knowing (so knowing, in fact, that I often felt at sea when reading the dialogues between Hondorp and Hendricks), but the novel’s brevity and pace lend itself easily, like Gatsby, to another perusal to linger over some aspect that memorably pleased (and there were several such funny scenes and characterizations) and thereby better glimpse something of the elusive bigger picture.
Television has little to do initially with the portrait that Stern paints of his central protagonist, the 38-year-old perpetual student Hondorp, whose life at the novel’s start consists only of roaming the streets of New York, observing, mingling with people, passing time till he can go home to his father’s apartment in Manhattan—where, after dinner, he reads, and his father languishes in front of the tv till he sleeps—and then begin again his aimless routine all over the next day.
One day Hondorp visits a bookstore and finds himself golked, which in turn leads him to execute a golk, then to become a golk. Golk himself, about whom so many in this novel revolve, is the mastermind behind the hidden camera expose, which he uses to entrap people into behaving naturally in slightly extraordinary circumstances. The concept has its extra-novel correlate in Alan Funt’s Candid Camera, a radio, then television show, which in several incarnations, prevailed on television for forty years, now displaced by the likes of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and the plethora of youtube offerings. Golk is a self-made man, born with the surname Pomeroy in Rhode Island, but when he gravitated to New York after the second world war, he remade himself and devised his métier.
At the juncture Golk has snared Hondorp, the show is about to get picked up for national distribution on one of the major networks. When it is, the show is immediately popular, and Hondorp’s life also begins to take off. He is drawn to Elaine Hendricks, a mid-20-ish divorcee who comes from money, and whose peripatetic past included a wealthy and abusive husband. Hondorp and Hendricks are both golks, and they are principally in charge of producing the golks. Golk’s ambitions are to take his show to heights of revelation, where he uncovers the seedier workings of the powerful, the movers and shakers who control people’s lives, to bring them down to size and make them seem no more than the common man, if not worse. After executing a few of these larger golks, which result in lawsuits and reduced ratings, Golk is gently ousted from his role as the show’s lead, and Hondorp and Hendricks happily take the reins in his place.
Hondorp and Hendricks cavalierly decide to marry after they have successfully scaled back the show to the network’s satisfaction. Interlarded in the romance of Hondorp and Hendricks are a couple of scenes of Golk on the skids, unsure of where he might go and what he might do, initially resentful and upset, then resigned. Several months later Hondorp and Hendricks begin to receive random, intermittent postcards from Golk, which both pique curiosity and guilt. When Hondorp’s father dies, Hendricks only hears about it after the funeral, and she takes this as signal that Hondorp has gone beyond the pale, that he is dead emotionally. They break up, the show is canceled and replaced, the golks all disperse, and after Hondorp has spent six months in Chicago as a late night dj, he visits LA looking for a job and sees Golk, high atop some stage set. They salute one another from afar, but Hondorp is quickly back on his way to Chicago, certain that he will never aspire to anything again.
The novel has quietly skewered and roasted out of Hondorp whatever life juices he might have had. It’s painful witnessing his descent into non-feeling, non-being, and non-participation. Golk has made—a late postcard explains that “golk” means “fool”—of all those around him fools, those whom he used, and those whom he exploited. People were willing to become golks, for it was an entrée into celebrity, an exalted realm above the activities of the mere scrabblers in life. I’m not certain that Stern was working out this formulation about the numbing and deadening qualities of too-pervasive television and the false intimacy of celebrity, but it seems to pertain. To generalize from the particulars of Hondorp’s singularity—to make of him a type or an everyman—is probably not Stern’s intention, at least not in such bald terms. There are shades of “The Great Gatsby” here—Holdorp as Nick and Golk as Gatsby—and the conclusions of each have the same wistful desperation.
Stern’s writing is fast-paced, wry, and very knowing (so knowing, in fact, that I often felt at sea when reading the dialogues between Hondorp and Hendricks), but the novel’s brevity and pace lend itself easily, like Gatsby, to another perusal to linger over some aspect that memorably pleased (and there were several such funny scenes and characterizations) and thereby better glimpse something of the elusive bigger picture.
August 7, 2023
I found this battered novel in the basement of Black Squirrel Books in Ottawa, ON, buried in a pile of old, orange Penguin paperbacks (if you ever see a pile of old, orange Penguin paperbacks, do not walk away from them. They are almost always worth reading) and my suspicions proved correct. It is a hidden gem. An amusing, insightful and fictional view of "Reality TV" in the mid 50's (and even today). Neglected in that used bookstore and mostly overlooked here on Goodreads. I took it to the counter along with my other unloved discoveries and the cashier was momentarily flummoxed over what to charge me. They hadn't even bothered to price them.
"Believe me, "I said. "No one else wants these but me."
Fingering the battered cover and flipping through the yellowed pages inside, eventually the cashier saw my point and I purchased it for a mere two bucks.
"Believe me, "I said. "No one else wants these but me."
Fingering the battered cover and flipping through the yellowed pages inside, eventually the cashier saw my point and I purchased it for a mere two bucks.
February 28, 2017
Golk è il direttore della più moderna trasmissione televisiva, il demiurgo di un mondo che corrisponde all'immagine di esso che filtra attraverso gli schermi, colui che ha reso il cittadino comune protagonista di un grande show. Attraverso questa figura e il programma che con essa si identifica Richard Stern propone una riflessione sulla vanità, sugli eccessi dell'esposizione mediatica e della fama, sulla trasformazione dell'industria dell'intrattenimento negli anni in cui aveva appena iniziato ad affermarsi con la tv e sul rapporto fra realtà e artificio.
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May 18, 2024
First novel from neglected American writer Richard G. (optional) Stern. Long before Jamie Kennedy brought you his Experiment, long before Ashton Kutcher went out Punking left right and centre, and long before Jeremy Beadle went Beadling about, Stern brought us this satire on a television producer filming cinéma verité skits without the participants’ permission. The Golk is a tame version of the Punk, with the titular Golk golking about thinking up all manner of increasingly weird golks for his exploitative golkcast. The future of TV has proven far bleaker, weaker, and sicker than anything Stern imagined in this otherwise fairly mannered and talky novel that serves up unbiting and unamusing satire for the duration. This Penguin edition is notable for the drawing on the cover from a young Ralph Steadman.
October 17, 2025
I found this old 1963 Penguin orange and white paperback edition in the bottom of a 'Free Books' box in a charity shop and it is apparently a forgotten classic which is a pity because it's one of the funniest books I've read this year .
It's full of eccentric, deluded, and often manic characters who are running around New York led by the tyrannical Golk who has a head like an 'inverted pear"..
Herbert Hondorp's high-minded overblown thoughts that with his low-brow actions are so funny...
It's full of eccentric, deluded, and often manic characters who are running around New York led by the tyrannical Golk who has a head like an 'inverted pear"..
Herbert Hondorp's high-minded overblown thoughts that with his low-brow actions are so funny...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews