One might have expected James Frey to be able to write a
pretty good novel. After all, his name has become shorthand for the memoir wars
of the last few years, in which a series of popular and critically acclaimed
books went up in smoke after evidence surfaced that their content was rather
more fictional than had been originally claimed. The most famous of these, of
course, was Frey’s addiction-recovery chronicle A Million Little Pieces, to which Oprah gave her imprimatur, then
took it back during an on-air flogging in which she castigated the writer for
his "lies."
Frey became the poster boy for this cultural moment not only
because his implosion was so spectacular, but also because in the face of the
backlash, he continued to insist that his story was true. He may have
exaggerated or altered a few details, he admitted, but the fundamentals of his
book--from the now-famous account of undergoing root canal surgery without
anesthetic to the ghastly depiction of a decade-plus drug and alcohol habit
that began at the age of ten--were true to the story of his addiction and
recovery. As he remembered it, anyway.
But, as Joe Hagan reported in the New York Observer back in 2003, when A Million Little Pieces first appeared,
the book was originally shopped as a novel. (Nan A. Talese, the book’s
publisher, has repeatedly denied this.) More recently, in a Vanity Fair profile
by Evgenia Peretz, Frey made explicit his literary intentions. Like his role
models, who include Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Charles Bukowski, Frey
envisioned writing about “my own life in some way that, in the best-case
scenario, would constitute art or literature. I’ve never had any interest at
all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate
autobiography.” He might have mentioned
it sooner! one can imagine Oprah screaming.
But while the reviews
of Bright Shiny Morning have
invariably included some tongue-in-cheek reference to Frey’s “first published
novel,” it’s striking how sharply he has deviated from his successful formula.
(A Million Little Pieces was followed
by another best-seller, My Friend Leonard,
which begins by describing the three-month-long jail term that Frey now admits
never happened.) Rather than following an autobiographically based character
through anything resembling a traditional storyline, Frey has constructed his
novel out of fragments of contemporary Los Angeles--the stories of literally
hundreds of different characters. Some of them merit only a line; others
ricochet through this very long book on trajectories interrupted by tangents
ranging from nuggets of L.A. history (“In 1886, while on their honeymoon,
Hobart Johnstone Whitley and Margaret Virginia Whitley decide to name their
country home Hollywood”) to lengthy discourses on the city’s neighborhoods and roads.
In all this, it’s hard to tell whether the divider between fact and fiction is
intentionally blurred or just sloppily drawn; bloggers have been getting a kick
out of pointing out the fact-checking errors in Frey’s potted histories, but
the book is prefaced by one of the most freighted disclaimers in publishing memory: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.”
Unfortunately, Frey, indulging his imaginative exuberance,
has overlooked the fact that fiction, too, needs to have a certain degree of truth
if it is to be believable. The central characters are stock figures who could
have been picked up off a B-movie lot. Amberton Parker is a closeted movie star
whose life is a series of absurd excesses: “Dates an
actress the biggest!!! actress in the world. Dates a model who goes by one
name. Dates a debutante, an Olympic swimmer the winner of six gold medals, a
prima ballerina.” Old Man Joe is a beach bum whose hair turned white overnight
at the age of 29; he lives in a bathroom and survives on the pickings
from dumpsters and his two daily bottles of Chablis. Esperanza is born just
north of the border to two illegal immigrants: Her father picks fruit and her
mother cleans houses. And Dylan and Maddie, both 19, are escaping Maddie’s
abusive family and pursuing the American dream:
They can see the glow a hundred miles away it’s night and they’re on an empty desert highway. They’ve been driving for two days. They grew up in a small town in Ohio they have known each other their entire lives, they have always been together in some way, even when they were too young to know what it was or what it meant, they were together….
Screaming, he could hear her screaming as he pulled into the driveway. He ran into the house her mother was dragging her along the floor by her hair….
He picked her up and carried her to his truck, a reliable old American pickup with a mattress in the back and a camper shell over the bed. He set her in the passenger seat carefully set her and he covered her with his jacket. She was sobbing bleeding it wasn’t the first time it would be the last. He got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, pulled out as he pulled out Mother came to the door with a hammer and watched them drive away, didn’t move, didn’t say a word, just stood in the door holding a hammer, her daughter’s blood beneath her fingernails, her daughter’s hair still caught in her clothes and hands.
They lived in a small town in an eastern state it was nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full of alcohol, abuse and religion.
This brief passage demonstrates
everything that is terribly wrong with Frey’s novel: the deadening repetition
and run-on sentences, the sentimentality (“it wasn’t the first time it would be
the last”), the gratuitous gore, the incoherence (
Alas, this is Frey’s predominant technique.
Everything is familiar: We’ve heard it all before, probably the same place he
did. We are given a rape scene in a garage, a failed child star, a gruff biker,
a football star who breaks his leg, anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic,
even jihadis preparing for a terrorist attack (“They live on quiet streets and
they wait to die and they pray to the East that they take you with them”). One
section consists of potted vignettes of people who came to L.A. looking for
fame: They start with long paragraphs (we learn about Kelly, once
second-runner-up in the Little Miss Chattanooga Jr. Princess division, now a
waitress at a 1950s-themed restaurant) and dwindle down to single-word
sentences: “Tom. Screenwriter. Makes pizzas. Kurt. Actor. Delivers pizzas.” We
meet Samantha, a child model and aspiring actress who turns to prostitution
when her father gets sick: “They all knew it was bad, worse than bad, they
knew how it was going to end. There was blood seeping out of the incision, and
they knew how it was going to end.” As always with Frey, repetition substitutes
for tragedy.
Sprinkled throughout these
so-called stories are what Frey calls “facts” about
And when Frey does make an effort
to flesh out a few of his characters, the results are laughable. Amberton and
his wife Casey, business partners if not sexual partners, lead a version of
movie star life that could only be a joke: “Their yoga teacher arrives, they go
into the studio, and, as is the case from time to time, they do their yoga
session in their thongs. When they’re finished they shower get dressed meet in
the kitchen, where they have lunch with their children and their children’s
nannies. After lunch they see their respective therapists (she has issues with
her father, he has issues with his mother) and then they see a therapist
together (they both have issues with fame and adulation). When they’re done
with their therapy (twice a week, three times if it’s a bad week), they go back
to their rooms change back into their thongs Casey wears a top because the
afternoon sun tends to be more powerful they meet at the pool.” After Amberton,
who has a taste for seducing men younger and less powerful than he, is rejected
by his latest would-be conquest, Casey takes the blackmail upon herself,
explaining to the low-level agent who rebuffed him: “Movie stars get what they
want, when they want it, because we’re the reason people pay money to go to the
movies…. Amberton and I are two of the biggest movie stars in the world. You
work for the agency that represents us. That agency makes millions of dollars,
tens of millions of dollars, off of us. Their job, and your job, is to service
us…. If we want you fired, it can be done with a phone call.” As villains, they
are ludicrous; as movie stars, they are impossible.
Late in the novel, an
exhausted-seeming Frey has perhaps realized that he is unable to invent
characters and starts borrowing them from real life. So we are given the thinly
fictionalized life history of a certain gossip blogger, born in Miami to Cuban
parents, who gives his website a Hispanized version of the name of a socialite
involved in a sex tape scandal; and a romanticized description of a famous
business tycoon-turned-art lover who, despite a superficial resemblance to Eli
Broad, is one of the book’s least believable characters: “He knew nothing but
felt everything…. He started a foundation. He amassed the greatest collection
on the planet. He did it all for love.”
“Scandal, motherfuckers, everybody
loves a scandal,” Frey writes toward the end of the novel (it would imply too
much intentionality to call it a conclusion). “Even if you try to turn away,
you can’t, when you try to ignore it, you find it impossible. You know why?
Because it’s awesome, hilarious, awful, it’s a fucking mess, and it almost
always makes you feel better about yourself.” This aside to the reader, an
obvious reference to the dust-up over A
Million Little Pieces, seems intended to defuse any lingering doubts about
Frey’s latest career move. But the irony, of course, is that Frey’s fiction is
so bad it could almost constitute a brief in his defense. Maybe more of that
memoir was true than we thought.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The