BWW Reviews: FAME SHARK Is Gritty Examination Of One Man's Need For Celebrity

As singer/songwriter Dory Previn famously asked, "who do you have to ... to become important?... Who do you have to trick to be picked for the the flick?"

Even before Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame", Americans were driven by the compulsion to become important as quickly as possible and to do anything necessary to get there. Royal Young is no exception. FAME SHARK, which has become an object of intense attention and has indeed propelled Young to the attention of literati, has succeeded in getting Young some degree of celebrity already through the book itself - which is a chronicle of his previously failed attempts to achieve celebrity.

Although there's a certain cynicism to the observation that young Mr. Young has indeed become famous for chronicling his attempts to become famous, it's not undeserved given the circumstances. But there's merit, nonetheless, to Young's effort, because FAME SHARK is a worthy piece of writing on its own. Don't read it to support anyone's inner demons requiring fame, but do read it because it is a fine piece of writing.

FAME SHARK has been described elsewhere as "memoir noir," and that's not badly put. It's gritty, it's witty, it's soul-baring without either whining or unattractive over-analysis. Royal Young felt neglected by his artist father as a child, set out on a path as a child movie extra that gave immediate attention gratification but didn't pan out later, and went on to do pretty much anything that he thought might continue to focus attention on him. You can almost hear Freud going into hyperdrive over Young's family dysfunction, over his being ignored by a straight male artist father so that the father could make penis art instead, and his being dismissed by his therapist mother as not being sufficiently clinically interesting for her to analyze. You can hear the child psychologists arguing over the issues of early childhood near-celebrity caused by his film-extra career. Between those and his Lower East Side/Hell's Kitchen youth, the DUI that gave him an excuse to run from college in Vermont and the drugs on the way to and through his non-existent modeling career seem almost inevitable.

And let's not even consider the neurotic Jewish family roots. Portnoy was a loser compared to Mr. Young -- born Hazak Brozgold. Bacon may have been on the menu at his home, but it didn't reduce the size of the servings of guilt or any of the rest of it.

Whether recalling being thrown over and thwarted in young love at a Goo Goo Dolls concert, or concluding that going to parties and finding film crew to give himself up to in exchange for the possibility of getting back on screen as a young adult (shades of Previn's musings on Marilyn) might be effective in re-establishing his childhood career, Young is not afraid to expose his warts. Embarrassment about romance and confessions of unrewarded gay-for-pay, however, and even his recollections about his drug use, can't even touch his exposure of his winding up in a relationship with a girl who's fourteen-going-on-thirty. In a world of wrong choices, Royal Young has made them, and he's willing to share what appears to be all of them, without romanticizing any of them.

His relations with his family feel more peculiar than the details of his misspent life-to-date as stated; his tentative eviction/near-disowning/casting-out and reunion through relative deaths seems almost too literary in comparison with the rest of the story and the rest of his writing style, but even if some indulgence should not be given for this being a first work, there would appear to be a huge vein of literary ore still to be mined here, and perhaps Young will continue to do so in a later work, since, speaking of veins, he clearly does not mind letting them in order to chronicle his truths about his life.

What Royal Young is good at, and should become known for, is some tightly crafted prose. This is a fine first work, and whether he continues in the vein of memoir, or pushes into fully-formed fiction, readers can't help but want more of this. He's capable of building a scene neatly; he's expert at clear, detailed exposition, and he's got a knack for a great turn of phrase.

Heliotrope Books prides itself on publishing books that might be risky, but this seems less risky than many, as it's well-written and almost compulsively interesting to any reader who can admit to a weakness for real-life tawdriness; it's a fairly quick read, neither a long work nor one that a reader is likely to lay aside. It's more of a sure bet, in these days of reality television, that a real-life confessional that is this neatly made will attract attention for author and publisher alike. Young's ingratiating, for all of his failings - or perhaps because of them, and the reader can't help but hope that he will manage to become important without having to fall back once again on Dory Previn's stated formula for success.

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