"Richard Stern is the best American fiction writer of whom you have
never heard" (Boris Fishman, The New Republic, 17 October 2005).
The statement is unverifiable; all I can say is that Golk leaves the possibility open. It was written in 1960, but set a few years earlier, as television begins its reign over the American imagination; and it's one of the first novels to get really angry about that fact. Golk is a prankster with a camera, evidently inspired by (though not a portrait of) Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, but with more ambition. The protagonist is one of his assistants, Hondorp, plucked from obscurity as a perpetual student when he shows a flair for extemporisation, and discovering reserves of ambition and unscrupulousness in himself.
Stern's prose is alternately lyrical and abrupt, lucid and knotty - exciting, but hard to settle to: I haven't finished the book and don't know that I will. A satire out of its own time is a difficult proposition, though the atmosphere of television hasn't changed all that much; you can see how much of Stern's acerbity could be directed at reality television. The jacket of Golk quotes Saul Bellow: "fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without weariness". The atmosphere is jaded and frantic: it reminds me of The Loved One - not so much Waugh's novel as the film (script by Terry Southern, directed by Tony Richardson: a jangling compilation of archness, edited to a fantastic pace).
I bought it purely for the cover: Ralph Steadman, as you'll have spotted. A little Steadman goes a long way for me - variety of mood or technique aren't what he's about - but the mood is right for this book, all rage and peculiarity.
It's not hard to find on the web, and you shouldn't have to pay more than £3 (mine cost a few pence less than that on eBay).