By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

Give the bloodied but clearly unbowed James Frey points for unbridled ambition.

His truth-challenged memoir A Million Little Pieces may have put Oprah’s knickers in a televised twist, but Frey’s new novel, Bright Shiny Morning,reveals a massive literary ego in full, flourishing bloom.

MORE: James Frey takes a novel approach with ‘Morning’ 

Unfettered by traditional grammar, punctuation or even paragraphs, Frey has pounded out a novel that tries to rip open the raw underbelly of modern Los Angeles. His goal: to reveal the booze-soaked, drug-crazed, porn-addicted Sodom with all its corruption, cruelty and occasional moments of transcendent beauty.

Bright Shiny Morning teems with dozens of characters. Maybe hundreds. Some appear briefly, others stay for the whole book. The central ones: a psycho male movie star, a saintly Hispanic domestic, two Midwestern teens and an alcoholic bum.

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Alas, Frey is no John Steinbeck or Dos Passos. Morning is a gusher, too often spouting bad prose, predictable plot turns, and one-dimensional characters (the poor ones are good, the rich one evil).

There’s also constant bad behavior: booze, abuse, crime, murder. Frey also tosses in a celebration of young love that would do a romance writer proud. By the end, Morning reads like a saccharine-sweet Hallmark Special that Oliver Stone wrote and Quentin Tarantino directed.

Frey also includes a tsunami of historical trivia about the city: gang names, riots, highways, movie trivia, floods. Which is kind of neat.

Bottom line: If, despite the scandal, you loved A Million Little Pieces, you might want to devour Bright Shiny Morning. Like its author, it can be called many things, but never boring. Or timid.