Monday, August 26, 2013

Fame Shark


                                                                                                              photo: Amanda Segur
Royal Young’s Fame Shark  should really be called Fame Piranha since it describes the sensibility of an omnivore and polymath who is plainly intent on gobbling up reality. Even though it’s a memoir Fame Shark reads like an old fashioned bildungsroman and aficionados of Yiddishkeit will appreciate the comparison between the Lower East Side that Young (aka Hasak Brozgold ) describes and the immigrant world of the Henry Roth classic Call It Sleep. Fame Shark is really American Psycho meets Call It Sleep with a little bit of Frank Harris’s My Live and Loves thrown in to the extent that it’s a no holds barred saga of the extremes a human being can go to in his or her quest for attention. Ultimately Fame Shark is a book about a life and Young’s is a life that has the precocity and audacity of a Shelley who also had a considerable amount of what euphemistically used to be called “experience” at a young age and the fearlessness of a Philippe Petit.

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