from the UK Daily Mail

Bright Shiny Morning

By James Frey (John Murray, £11.99)

By ROSS GILFILLAN
Last updated at 6:30 PM on 19th August 2008

Following his controversial memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey takes as his subject nothing less than the city of Los Angeles.

Central to his story is a small band of differently circumstanced characters. Esperanza is a Mexican maid who pretends to be an illegal immigrant to get work as a cleaner. Amberton Parker is a movie mega-star turned stalker; while Old Man Joe is a Chablis-drinking bum living on Venice Beach and dreaming of performing a heroic deed. 

A huge supporting cast includes romantic golf caddies and would-be film actors, murderous bikers and down-at-heel denizens of trailer parks. Their stories, which can be touching, tragic and occasionally repellent, are interrupted by frequent digressions about the history and development of the city, its highway system, epidemic gang culture and the birth of its film industry. 

Facts, both accurate and questionable, come thick and fast. Surprisingly, these don’t disturb the relentless rhythm of a sparkling narrative, which doesn’t shrink from exposing the city’s seamier side but ultimately is a huge celebration — Frey’s ode to L.A. Never mind that Little Pieces was said to be fiction posing as fact. With Bright Shiny Morning, Frey confirms that fiction - the real McCoy - is indeed his metier.

[ click to read at the Daily Mail ]

from The Guardian UK

Saved by the City of Angels

Irvine Welsh is entranced by James Frey’s tale of redemption - ‘the literary comeback of the decade’

• The Guardian, 
• Saturday August 2 2008 

James Frey’s first foray into the world of books, his supposed autobiography A Million Little Pieces, was a spectacular debut in that it provoked that rarest of events: a genuine literary scandal. The book, and its follow-up My Friend Leonard, were grim tales of a life of addiction, depravity and criminality, written with uncompromising turbo-charged power. Endorsed by literary kingmaker Oprah Winfrey in her book club, A Million Little Pieces went on to swiftly achieve bestseller status.

There was only one problem: the life and the events depicted had little to do with the author. The Smoking Gun website undertook a thorough investigation, through court reports and interviews with local police officials, producing a damning rebuttal of Frey’s incarceration claims. Old cohorts were hunted down, who testified to his unremarkable rather than misspent youth. The biographies amounted to more than a white suburban kid’s petty exaggerations of his misdemeanours; the Smoking Gun highlighted many outright fabrications, one of which was particularly shameful and highly distressing to the friends and family of a girl who had died in a road accident.

Frey was originally feted by Hollywood and many of its stars, excited by what they saw as the real deal in that chamber of artifice. His transformation from literary hero to pariah was complete when his publishers were compelled to admit to the falsifications in the books, and even took the unprecedented step of offering purchasers their money back. Frey gamely reappeared on Oprah, where the host, livid at being cast as an unwitting stooge in the scam, tore strips off both him and his publisher, eliciting sheepish confessions. For the US reading public, it was a bit like finding out that Frank McCourt grew up in a luxury penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

You would perhaps think that the only occasion on which Frey might have been inclined to look at a pen and paper again would have been filling in a bookie’s slip with a trembling hand. But he has shown remarkable resilience, producing Bright Shiny Morning, a work of fiction that carries the disclaimer: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” That acknowledgment is of course redundant here, belonging instead on his first two works.

The amazing thing about Bright Shiny Morning is that it is an absolute triumph of a novel. In fact, it’s so good that it makes Frey’s real-life resurrection from crooked biographer to great American novelist far more impressive than his fantasised one from down-and-out drug monster to bestselling writer. Freed from the responsibility of getting the facts right, Frey, a natural novelist to his fingertips, hits the deeper truths with this honest, vibrant and tender portrait of Los Angeles and the American dream. It’s Bright Shiny Morning, not A Million Little Pieces, that is the real tale of stunning redemption.

As Frey depicts a litany of lost and hopeful souls who are sucked into the City of Angels, the novel becomes a comprehensive biography of that most alluring and dangerous metropolis. He understands LA, its attractions and dangers, and the diverse aspirants who navigate its choked freeways, cheap motels, seedy apartments and gated mansions. The touching love story of runaways Dylan and Maddy and the well-meaning beach bum Joe, who woke up one morning 30 years older, runs side by side with the tale of the predatory closet-homosexual movie star Amberton and his sham business-partner wife, Casey. Then there is the self-conscious cleaner Esperanza, abused by a rich, racist white woman before finding an unlikely but convincing love.

The book contains historical vignettes of LA, tracing its corruption and its foibles, until - as always happens in the best novels - the city itself becomes a character; a wild and volatile multi-tentacled beast capable of bestowing great hurt (and the odd chunk of real love) on those who are enmeshed in it. By its end, the reader has been privy to that rarest of things: a searing critique of the world we’ve created, yet an uncompromising affirmation of our humanity.

Bukowski has been cited as one of Frey’s literary antecedents, but the truth is that the former never wrote a novel as good as Bright Shiny Morning. The voice is assured yet compassionate, and only occasionally slips out of register, usually when Frey falls back into the showboating sneer of A Million Little Pieces: “At the turn of the century, when opium and cocaine were outlawed (yeah, both used to be legal, woohoo, woohoo), and alcohol and prostitution became the area’s primary business …”

Such lapses, though, are very rare in a beautifully disciplined and weighted novel, propelled forward with great narrative skill. It can be no exaggeration to say that Bright Shiny Morning amounts to the literary comeback of the decade. It may be a pitiful weakness that led Frey down the road to deceit in A Million Little Pieces, but by penning his own resurrection, he has demonstrated unquestionable courage and a wholly justified self-belief in his skills as a writer. If his story tells us anything, it’s that being a deluded fantasist and pathological liar may be a disadvantage for a biographer, but it’s a decided asset for a novelist.

As hard as it may be for many to swallow, particularly those who place a premium on personal integrity, James Frey is probably one of the finest and most important writers to have emerged in recent years. Nobody likes to be conned, but real lovers of enlightened, cutting-edge contemporary fiction who elect to miss Bright Shiny Morning on the basis of the myriad deceptions contained in A Million Little Pieces are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

· Irvine Welsh’s latest novel is Crime (Cape)

[ click to read at The Guardian ]

from Waterstones UK

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

From the publisher: Welcome to LA. City of contradictions. It is home to movie stars and down-and-outs. Palm-lined beaches and gridlock. Shopping sprees and gun sprees. Bright Shiny Morning takes a wild ride through the ultimate metropolis, where glittering excess rubs shoulders with seedy depravity. Frey’s trademark filmic snapshots zoom in on the parallel lives of diverse characters, bringing their egos and ideals, hopes and despairs, anxieties and absurdities vividly to life. Some suffer, like the otherworldly wino who tries to save a spoilt teenage runaway. Others gain, like the canny talent agent who turns sexual harassment to blackmailing advantage. Some are loaded, or grounded, and have luck on their side. Others, like the countless actresses-turned-hookers, or schoolboys-turned-gangsters, are doomed.“

Out of the many characters in Bright Shiny Morning, one dominates them all - the city of Los Angeles. Frey etches out the city’s persona through the experiences of a cross-section of its inhabitants, from the highest to the very lowest. It is testament to his skills that even the most profoundly unsympathetic of these individuals cannot fail to get under your skin and the novel is always engaging although don’t expect a story in the conventional sense.”  

Tom Goddard, Waterstones.com

An ambitious and wide-ranging first novel from the author of the controversial rehab memoir, A Million Little Pieces which paints a vivid fictional portrait of the city of Los Angeles and its many and varied inhabitants…Did you feel that James Frey suceeded in creating believable and sympathetic characters here? How did you find the unconventional narrative structure of the book? Did it affect your overall enjoyment of the book? Does the book provide a rounded portrait of the city that gives a real impression of sense of place and what the city is like? Did you empathise with any of the characters more than others? Amberton, Dylan, Old Man Joe - who did you feel was the most convincing character?

[ click to visit Waterstones ]

from Shelfari.com

Bright Shiny Morning

by James Frey

Editorial Review

Back to book overview

One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass across the reader’s sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA’s lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.

Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

[ click to visit Shelfari ]

from the New York Observer

Bright, Shiny and Long 

James Frey’s first novel lulls L.A. into familiar territory

BY HILLARY FREY  |  MAY 21, 2008 

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
By James Frey
Harper, 501 pages, $26.95

I WASN’T FAR INTO James Frey’s debut novel, Bright Shiny Morning—around page 50 of 501—when I felt a sense of déjà vu. The words weren’t stolen, but the story suddenly seemed so familiar.

This particular Carveresque passage described a married couple, Tammy and Carl, who live in a trailer park in the Pacific Palisades. They’d gotten pregnant young and come west from Oklahoma, dreaming of living near the beach. They had a bunch of kids who all grew up to be successful, but Tammy and Carl stayed in their trailer, sharing views of Malibu that others paid millions for. “Like hundreds of thousands of people a year,” writes Mr. Frey, “[they] came to Los Angeles to make their dreams come true. Sometimes it happens.”

A song started looping in my head: “Into the Great Wide Open,” by Tom Petty. (It’s a song about a couple in L.A.—aren’t all Tom Petty songs about L.A.?—trying to make their dreams come true.) Later, at Mr. Frey’s mention of Reseda, a district in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Petty’s “Free Fallin’” took over (”It’s a long day, living in Reseda/ There’s a freeway, runnin’ through the yard.”)

That was it: James Frey’s book is one very long Tom Petty song.

And like a Tom Petty song—which is quite repetitive and predictable but which also sticks in your head in such a way that it becomes inextricably linked to some memory from your teens or 20s, of driving to Ocean City or to a football game or to a really good party—Mr. Frey’s book will stick with you, too. 

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING ISN’T a great book, though it is, as Sara Nelson wrote in Publisher’s Weekly, “un-put-downable.” Mr. Frey’s other books—the scandal-making memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) and the quite obviously embellished follow-up, My Friend Leonard (2005)—were similarly addictive. His books are like crappy movies on a Sunday afternoon; you think, well, if I don’t like it, I don’t have to watch it. But then, you don’t really have anything else to do, and you get hooked—after 20 minutes, you have to know what happens to the druggie teenager—and, really, it’s only a few hours of your life. (Despite the length, the novel only takes an afternoon to read. More on that shortly.)

Still, Bright Shiny Morning isn’t very pleasurable. As always, Mr. Frey is obsessed with brutality, and few in his sprawling book escape to safety. There are four main stories: a superfamous Hollywood couple with a secret (their marriage is a sham—he’s gay and she’s bisexual); a young couple from Ohio escaping abusive families; a homeless man in Venice living an ethical, if drunk, life; and a young, smart Mexican-American woman working for an old, tyrannical white lady in Pasadena. All of these stories are crazy with violence.

Of course, that’s what makes the book a page-turner: Will Old Joe live after being assaulted by a bunch of meth heads? Will Dylan come back after being abducted by a biker gang? Will Amberton really order his lover’s mother to be killed? We have to know the answers to these questions, and Mr. Frey’s minimalist style is lighter than the breeze. At the same time, the stories are so over-the-top, the violence so grotesque, that it’s hard to take any of it very seriously. Which is unfortunate: Mr. Frey doesn’t intend for his novel to be read as a satire but rather as a hyper-realistic, this-is-the-way-it-is-out-there-motherfucker portrait of Los Angeles. He really believes that the world is relentlessly ugly. It isn’t.

BACK TO TOM PETTY, WHO tends to strike a more melancholy note in his odes to L.A. than Mr. Frey. Both trade almost entirely in stereotypes—that’s why Bright Shiny Morningfeels so rote.

Of course the Mexican-American woman gets sidetracked from going to college and has to work as a housekeeper—and for a woman of particular cruelty and fierce physical strength. And of course the young couple from Ohio gets pregnant. Of course the big movie star is secretly gay. And of course the homeless guy has a heart of gold. These characters are supposed to be revelatory in some way, their stories tragic and shocking. But they’re just what we’ve heard a million times before. Girl moves to Hollywood to be an actress; girl ends up in porn. Boy moves to Hollywood to break into TV; boy ends up a junkie.

Mr. Frey writes like he’s sharing these stories for the first time. In a way, it’s charming, and the book’s insistence on its own importance is part of what keeps you reading. You can’t shake the hope that Mr. Frey will surprise you. But he doesn’t. Every story turns out just as you expect.

SPRINKLED AMONG THE four main stories and countless other mini-profiles of unnamed, central-casting sorts of characters are facts about the county of Los Angeles. In the beginning, full pages sport three or four lines of text noting some fact about the area (all that white space is one reason why the book is such a snap to read); later, Mr. Frey gets more ambitious, writing long descriptive passages about various neighborhoods.

Although he slaps a disclaimer upfront (”Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable”), these “fact” passages are a real problem. Yes, it’s a novel, and in a novel—as Mr. Frey was reminded time and again after the controversy over A Million Little Pieces—you can make stuff up. But not really—not if your book is clearly meant to be a sweeping history of a certain place. And given Mr. Frey’s track record, there are obvious questions looming: How accurate are these “fun facts,” as he calls them? What are his sources? It doesn’t help that long passages read just like Wikipedia entries.

Bright Shiny Morning isn’t the disaster some Frey-haters probably hoped for, but it’s not special, either. A supposedly honest look at the nastiness of human nature, written without punctuation (though there’s more than you’d think!) and a fake urgency that should lead somewhere new, the novel merely manipulates you into doing exactly what James Frey wants. He leads you into the hills high above Hollywood, shows you the most spectacular view of the hideousness that is Los Angeles, and then abandons you to make the only choice you can: to jump.

Hillary Frey (no relation) edits the culture pages of The Observer. She can be reached at hfrey@observer.com.

[ click to read review at Observer.com ]

from Bloomberg News

James Frey’s “Bright Shiny Morning” falls apart

By Craig Seligman

Bloomberg News

“Bright Shiny Morning” by James Frey

Harper, 501 pp., $26.95

BOOK REVIEW |

A young couple who lift $20,000 from a biker gang. A predatory gay superstar whose latest fixation is a football hero. An adorable Chicana with thighs the size of tree trunks. A homeless wino who wants to save a meth-addled teen.

These are the major characters and plot lines of James Frey’s “Bright Shiny Morning.” Frey is the disgraced author of “A Million Little Pieces,” the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed memoir that turned out to be partly made up.

“Bright Shiny Morning” is a meaty social novel in the Tom Wolfe/Richard Price mold, though Frey’s manic run-on sentences can’t rival theirs in terms of craft. Its subject is Los Angeles from the bottom to the top, and unless you have ice in your veins you’ll find its 501 pages of tiny print compulsively readable. I did. By page 100 I was telling myself, “I love this book!” By page 300 I was restless. By the end I pretty much hated it.

Why? Because Frey doesn’t deliver on the expectations he raises. He doesn’t even seem to know he’s raised them. At first, as you weave among the major stories and the hordes of minor ones, you all but quiver with anticipation: How’s he going to tie this all together? Little by little you deflate as you realize: He’s not.

Nobody in one plot so much as brushes against someone in another plot. The themes in the free-standing essays bear little or no relation to the narrative sections.

Literary insanity?

Only a novelist at the edge of literary sanity would introduce on page 438, at a point when his parallel plots are barreling toward their climax, an 11-page essay on the L.A. art scene (a topic that has zilch to do with the rest of the book). Or follow it with a six-page list of soldiers who have been treated at local VA hospitals, with their maladies (less than zilch).

In general, the essays (on youth gangs, city districts, celebrity train wrecks and so forth) are less insightful than the tales; Frey seems to have a natural grasp of character. But although he’s a gifted storyteller, he has only two modes, saccharine and brutal. He’s also got two modes as an essayist, amazed (ah the depravity/diversity/splendor of L.A.!) and cynical:

“Everybody loves a scandal,” he writes. “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 … The bigger the better, the uglier the more fun, the more devastation the better you feel.”

Any particular scandal come to mind?

Raw talent

Despite its moronic politics (if you can call them that), in which poor equals virtuous and rich equals bad, “Bright Shiny Morning” looks less like a failure of writing than one of editing. Frey is a prototypical raw talent — a writer who can churn out readable prose by the ream but has no idea how to shape it or imbue it with taste. So he needs a strong editor, and either he didn’t get one or he was too bullheaded to accept the advice he was proffered.

The simplest solution to the book’s structural problems (though probably not the most commercial one) would have been to disentangle the components, slap on a table of contents and sell it as what it is: a compendium of pieces — some long, some short, some fiction, some reflection — about Los Angeles.

A more ambitious possibility (and a bigger chore) would have involved sending Frey back to his desk to finish up the job the way a novelist with any pride in his work is supposed to: by weaving the disparate parts into a coherent whole. Slicing them up and jumbling them, which is all he’s done, doesn’t turn “Bright Shiny Morning” into a novel. It turns it into a mess.

The author of “Bright Shiny Morning” will appear with novelist/memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eight Ave. Tickets are $5 — sponsored by Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600;www.elliottbaybook.com). Frey will also appear at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at a “Words & Wine” event at the W Hotel (info: 206-632-2419; www.kimricketts.com). 

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

[ click to read review at Bloomberg News ]

from USAToday

[ click to read at USAToday ]

from AP via the San Francisco Chronicle

James Frey emerges, with a novel about LA

By SARA ROSE, Associated Press writer

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

(05-14) 13:06 PDT , (AP) –

“Bright Shiny Morning” (HarperCollins, 501 pages, $26.95) by James Frey: In this age of controversial pseudo-memoirs, James Frey, the man who started it all, leaves his past behind and tackles Los Angeles in his new novel.

With a nod to the massive problems caused by his highly fictionalized memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” Frey begins with the disclaimer that “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” Yet “Bright Shiny Morning,” with its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to the past, present and future of Los Angeles, may be his most truthful book yet.

Like the city itself, “Bright Shiny Morning” is sprawling and disjointed. So we don’t accuse him of forgetting something, Frey saturates the pages, beginning each chapter with a history lesson and including characters ranging from an oversexed child star to drug-dealing bikers. Sifting through the true history, made-up history, lists of facts and multitude of characters, what slowly emerges is a surprisingly authentic and at times quite touching (though manipulative) picture of modern-day L.A.

Frey is still flashing his big neon “Look at me, I can write!” sign, and his style — lack of commas or quotes, incessant repetition — can still be irksome. Add the audacity of attempting to encapsulate one of the wildest, most fabled environments on the planet, and there are many ways this novel could have gone wrong. But he stays on a utilitarian, albeit bloated, course.

When not resurrecting L.A.’s history or making lists — gangs, museums, universities, nationalities, homicides, artists, and on and on — Frey focuses on four main stories: Old Man Joe, a 39-going-on-75-year-old homeless alcoholic whose attempt to help a meth addict goes terribly wrong; Amberton, a top actor whose obsession with a young man almost shatters his perfectly constructed life; Esperanza, a first-generation Latina who finds herself denying her intelligence and her family’s dreams for her future just to survive; and Dylan and Maddie, a young couple fleeing abuse and violence in the Midwest who come looking for a house by the ocean only to find a new brand of horror.

Mingling with these archetypal L.A. residents are various others. We’ve met them all before, so Frey finds no real need to dwell on them. It’s enough to remind us that they exist; that they are living and breathing with stories that will repeat and repeat as more and more people surge to L.A. searching out their dreams. L.A. will continue on. The rich and poor will continue in their separate worlds, killing and loving each other, colliding occasionally with either unhappy or happy outcomes.

Given Frey’s history, many may be inclined to approach “Bright Shiny Morning” with a roll of the eyes, discounting what is actually not a bad read. It’s too long, too cliched, too repetitive, too self-conscious, too skimmable and Frey’s rhythm will infect your mind. But for a long book it reads quickly, and Frey has proved that these old stories do have a little life left in them.

[ click to read at SFGate.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW

‘Bright Shiny Morning’ by James Frey

Shallow characters populate this poorly written, superficial novel set in Los Angeles.

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 

May 13, 2008

“Bright Shiny Morning” is a terrible book. One of the worst I’ve ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He’s got chutzpah. Two and a half years after he was eviscerated by Oprah Winfrey for exaggerating many of the incidents in his now-discredited memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” he’s back with this book, which aims to be the big novel about Los Angeles, a panoramic look at the city that seeks to tell us who we are and how we live.

Clearly, HarperCollins, Frey’s publisher, expects a lot from this book; it reportedly paid a million and a half dollars for it. You can interpret that in a few ways: as a shrewd business decision (as of this writing, the novel is No. 52 at Amazon.com) or as yet another symbol of a book industry in crisis, with publishers grasping at whatever straws they can to manufacture buzz.

Ultimately, though, it is still what’s on the page that matters, and “Bright Shiny Morning” is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining.

Written as an Altman-esque collage, it follows several parallel story lines that never coalesce. The idea is to trace a collective vision of the city, high and low, from Hollywood to the Valley to East L.A. — an attempt to get at the fluidity of Los Angeles.

There’s Old Man Joe, a drunk who inhabits a bathroom on the Venice boardwalk and seeks mystical affirmation in a daily ritual. Or Amberton Parker, a St. Paul’s and Harvard-educated Oscar-winning actor, who lives a perfect life with his wife and children and has a secret. (Bet you can’t guess what it is.)

As a connective device, Frey interweaves a series of short passages outlining the history of L.A., beginning with the founding of the Pueblo and extending to the present day. Yet this strategy ends up as a metaphor for all that’s wrong with the book. These bits read like encyclopedia entries, devoid of soul or personality, so generic as to be inconsequential, as if Frey has no interest or engagement in what he has chosen to write about.

That’s the issue with “Bright Shiny Morning” — or one of them, anyway. Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life. There are obligatory riffs on freeways and natural disasters and a chapter on visual artists that lists “the highest price ever paid for a piece of their work in a public auction.” There are also occasional installments of “Fun Facts” about the city, as if to give the illusion of a certain depth. Did you know that it is “illegal to lick a toad within the city limits of Los Angeles”? Neither did I. But I also don’t know what this has to do with the larger story of the novel, except as another example of L.A. as odd and quirky, a territory in which we all “live with Angels and chase their dreams.”

Frey, of course, intends this to be amusing, lighthearted and witty in tone. (”Learning fun facts is really an enjoyable, and sometimes enlightening process,” he writes. “And, of course, it’s fun too!!!”) It comes off as two-dimensional, however, not to mention poorly written and conceived — much like the book’s narrative elements.

Esperanza, a Chicana from East L.A., forgoes a college scholarship after being embarrassed at a high school graduation party over the size of her thighs. Eventually she takes a job as a maid for a tyrannical white woman in Pasadena, only to fall in love with the woman’s son.

That’s nothing compared to the story of Dylan and Maddie, two crazy kids from Ohio who come to L.A. with only their faith in each other to sustain them.

After nearly 300 pages, living on $20,000 they’ve stolen from a vicious drug-dealing motorcycle gang, Maddie turns to Dylan and says: “You know how I read all the gossip magazines while I’m at the pool? . . . And they’re all about these famous people, actresses and singers and models and stuff. . . . Well, I think that I want to be an actress.”

“An actress?” he asks.

“Yeah, I want to be a movie star.”

How do we reckon with a novel in which the desire to become an actress is treated as original and organic, in which the only Mexican American character is a maid?

How do we reckon with a book in which the city is flat and lifeless as a stage set, in which Frey uses broad generalizations (”Thirty-thousand Persians fleeing the rule of the ayatollahs. One-hundred and twenty-five thousand Armenians escaping Turkish genocide. Forty-thousand Laotians avoiding minefields. Seventy-five thousand Thais none in Bangkok sex shows.”) to try to animate what his imagination cannot?

Yes, this is Los Angeles, in the way a cheap Hollywood movie is Los Angeles: superficial, a collection of loose impressions that don’t add up.

Whatever else his failings as a writer, Frey was once able to move his readers; how else do we explain the success of “A Million Little Pieces”? It’s just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than “Bright Shiny Morning” could ever hope to be.

david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.

[ click to read at LATimes.com ]

from the New York Times

May 12, 2008

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way

By JANET MASLIN

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING By James Frey

He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.

He waited. They forgot about him. He tried again.

In the 1930s Los Angeles is the film capital of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of “The Great Gatsby,” comes to live there. He tries to write movies. He fails. He writes a Hollywood novel, “The Last Tycoon.” He says there are no second acts in American lives. He turns out to be wrong.

The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart. Every now and then he would pause the story, switch to the present tense and throw in an urban fact.

Like this: The Los Angeles area has a museum devoted to the banana.

James Frey loved Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and maybe even John Fante but he didn’t sound like them, he didn’t sound beat or cool. He sounded hopeful. He sounded unguarded, tender. He quit posturing. He stopped romanticizing squalor. He found new energy. He sounded more like Carl Sandburg in love hate thrall with great maddening Chicago than like the usual tough gritty moody chronicler of California’s broken dreams.

He wrote about people who were drawn to Los Angeles and who they were, why they came, what they wanted, whether they got it, if they didn’t get that, then what they got instead. He looked into their hearts. But he didn’t get sloppy, not maudlin. He just made up characters and wrote as if he cared about them desperately. Bright Shiny Morning. A new chance, real or illusory, that’s what they all wanted. Bright Shiny Morning. So he made that the name of the book.

His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force. (Look, somebody had to, if only to create a comeback drama.) But that wasn’t so far off the mark. Even if his publisher maybe could have asked more questions about what the banana museum had to do with anything.

Still, even the stray facts had their artistry. They helped turn this book into the captivating urban kaleidoscope that, most recently, Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children” was supposed to be. Bright Shiny Morning was mobile and alert to layout, tempo, different voices, how words looked on the page. Different visual styles suited different characters. Some got long litanies of brisk, sharp dialogue. Others got dense, descriptive prose.

Even the one-sentence page had its use here.

The language got sleek and arch when the book described two superstars, Amberton and Casey. A man and a woman, married to each other, best friends both gay no secrets. Everything perfect, supposed to look that way. Prop children. Money houses cars personal assistants nannies yoga teacher everything perfect. Wearing vicuña. Eating ahi tuna. Still Amberton wanted more, got a crush on an ex-football player. All this captured with elegance, with wit. Movie stars. Not so original, so what? So what if the book always made poor people humble decent better than rich spoiled profligate ones?

So there were Maddie and Dylan, young and in love, eking out a living and traveling on a moped, he eventually got a job as a caddy she as a clerk. The book loved them. There was Old Man Joe, homeless guy, living in a bathroom in Venice, Calif., somehow stronger more decent more heroic than the star who plays movie heroes.

And Esperanza, Mexican-American, working as a maid for an old white lady so mean she threw her morning cup of coffee if Esperanza didn’t make it right. But the old lady turned out to have a son. He liked Esperanza, liked treating her like a human being. Maybe he liked needling his mother even better.

There were easy ways a cynical, sentimental crybaby like the million little pieces guy could have told Esperanza’s part of the story. Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that’s what he knew about. That’s what he wrote about. That’s what he passed off as nonfiction. That’s why he sounded as if he’d seen too many lousy movies.

So the Bright Shiny Morning guy did it differently. He let the little vignette play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit. The son steals the maid’s virtue? Been there, read that. They plot against the old lady? Been there too. This novelist wanted something else for Esperanza: he wanted to honor her, fall in love with her, do it with startling sincerity. He wanted to save her.

And it worked.

That’s how James Frey saved himself.

[ click to read review in the New York Times ]

from the NY Daily News

Disgraced memoirist James Frey opts for fiction with ‘Bright Shiny Morning’

BY SHERRYL CONNELLY

Saturday, May 3rd 2008, 10:38 AM

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING by James Frey, Harper, $26.95

James Frey was publicly scourged by Oprah for fabricating pivotal passages in “A Million Little Pieces,” his “memoir” that she made a best seller when she chose it for her book club. Frey sat still for her nationally televised shaming, his dejection more real than his work.

Well, Frey isn’t taking it sitting down anymore. He defends his processes and calls out his editor for manipulation in the current Vanity Fair. Now comes his first novel, or at least his first book labeled fiction.

In the tradition of novels about Los Angeles, take Nathanael West on one hand and Jackie Collins on the other, then spread your arms wide. Somewhere in the middle, “Bright Shiny Morning” falls in your lap.

Frey begins on a droll note: “Nothing in this novel should be considered accurate or reliable.” He’s referring to the L.A.-centric lists that stud the book - highway routes, gang names, eccentric laws - where he’s said to mix facts with fiction, just like in his memoirs (his second was “My Friend Leonard”). Get it?

His many stories mix in the passing with the interspersed narratives of four couples.

A homeless drunk tries to protect a teenage street kid; a Mexican-American maid is humiliated by her mistress but loved by the woman’s son; two young runaways from the Midwest are desperate to start a new life in the city, two high-gloss movie stars fake their marriage to hide the fact both are gay.

It’s about grim failure in Tinseltown (West) and it’s so Hollywood, baby! (Collins) with screen-ready portrayals of the little people, too.

“Bright Shiny Morning” is a bit literary and a lot schlock. It’s also get-out commercial. Oprah won’t be reading it, but maybe you should. It won’t improve your life, but your weekend maybe?

[ click to read review at NY Daily News ]

I guess Michael Leaverton doesn’t like me.  from SFWeekly.com 

Mea Culpas Are for Suckers

By Michael Leaverton

The question of whether James Frey received redemption could not be answered by press time, for Frey’s new publisher, HarperCollins, did not send us his first novel, Bright Shiny Morning. HarperCollins did send a few people the book (but not us), while demanding that no reviews appear before the official publication date, which was Tuesday. Certainly he took his own advice to F.T.B.S.I.T.T.T.D, or Fuck the Bullshit It’s Time to Throw Down, since he has that tattooed on his arm. (Note to young writers: Don’t get this tattoo.) Actually, we did see one review: Frey defender Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly was granted the honor of releasing hers on April 14, and she called the book a “train wreck” and “unputdownable” in the same sentence, which is exactly what we think every time we open the latest James Patterson. It’s quite possible that Bright Shiny Morning, a thick book about everybody in L.A., might not move Frey too far toward his goal (now long-term) of being the best writer of his generation. But something tells us he’s going to be throwing down after fucking the bullshit for a long time to come. Take tonight, when he appears not under the guise of a put-upon writer but as, well, J.T. LeRoy circa 2003, booking a huge rock club and arming himself with local writer Stephen Elliott, writer and former drag queen Josh Kilmer-Purcell, photographs by Terry Richardson, and local metal band 3rdrail. Don’t make him feel like he F.T.B.S.I.T.T.T.D’ed for nothing.[ click to view original link at SFWeekly.com ]

from Entertainment Weekly

BOOK REVIEW

Bright Shiny Morning (2008)

James Frey

Writer: James Frey; Genres: Drama, Fiction; Publisher: Harper Collins

By Thom Geier

James Frey doesn’t lack ambition. In his first official novel, Bright Shiny Morning, the notorious ex-memoirist tries to capture the entirety of Los Angeles, that vast, heterogeneous city that’s both a destination for dreamers and a dumping ground for urban bottom-feeders. Imagine the movie Crash rewritten as a pastiche of Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jackie Collins — and you get a sense of the frustrating experience of reading this slack, self-indulgent mess.

While Frey has done loads of research on L.A., he seems to empty the contents of his notebooks rather than integrate them into a coherent story. He produces lists of gang names, eight pages describing the city’s highways, five pages of natural disasters in its history, another five naming patients in VA hospitals, eight pages of ”Fun Facts” and ”Facts Not So Fun.” The lists go on. And on.

He introduces scores of characters, some briefly (”Ron. Bodybuilder. Wants to be an action star. Works at a gym”) and others for a few pages (an online gossiper who’s clearly meant to suggest Perez Hilton). Ultimately, four principal plots emerge. Two are rather conventional tales of the downtrodden: There’s Joe, a 39-year-old homeless guy near Venice Beach, and Esperanza, the U.S.-born daughter of illegal Mexican immigrants, working as a maid to pay for college. Meanwhile, Amberton Parker, an A-list movie star who, like his actress wife, is deeply closeted, risks his career by sexually harassing a junior exec at his talent agency, an African-American former college football star. (Collins’ prurient romps are more believable.) Frey’s strongest creation is Dylan, a teen who steals his girlfriend, Maddie, from her abusive Midwestern home to forge a new life in L.A. Like the character ”James Frey” in the author’s previous books, Dylan is a basically nice guy from Ohio with a penchant for big risks and affectless banter, and a hunger for a surrogate father (in this case, Dylan’s boss at a golf course). While Maddie remains a cipher, Dylan’s story manages to rise above its implausibilities and suggest the compelling novel Morning might have been. But Frey never achieves narrative momentum — he’s too easily distracted by, say, a list of customers at a local gun store.

In fairness, Frey is not entirely to blame for the failure of Morning, which reads like the overreaching first draft of a gifted M.F.A. student. Where was Frey’s editor at HarperCollins to guide Frey into pruning the clutter and dramatizing the themes in his fact-based tangents? As it stands, Morning is like L.A. at its worst: undone by ambition, sprawl, and (verbal) smog. Not to mention a glib resistance to hard work. D+

[ click to read at EW.com ]

from TIME Magazine

Thursday, May. 08, 2008

The New James Frey: A Review

By Lev Grossman

I’m not going to get between you and James Frey. Frey, as everybody knows, is the author of two books that were published as memoirs–A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard–but turned out to be not especially factually accurate. I’m not that upset about it, mostly because I didn’t think the books were that great in the first place. They felt crude and overwrought and underthought to me, and maybe as if Frey were just a little too proud of what a thorough mess he’d made of his life. Yes, he violated the unwritten contract between writer and reader. I wouldn’t blame anybody for being mad at him. I just wasn’t that invested.

So I approached Frey’s new book, a novel called Bright Shiny Morning (Harper; 512 pages) with something approximating a neutral frame of mind. As it turns out, if you’re thinking of not buying it because of Frey’s past misdeeds, you might want to look for some other way of getting back at him, because it’s a pretty good read.

Bright Shiny Morning is a refreshingly archaic affair, an old-fashioned book written in an old-fashioned style. It’s less a novel about Los Angeles than it is Los Angeles–in-novel-form, an attempt to embrace and describe and sum up the city by mixing fictional story lines about diverse characters–rich, poor, homeless; black, white, Mexican–with actual facts (somebody might want to check them) about L.A.’s freeways and crime rates and history and such. It’s reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe’s billion-footed beasts, but it’s even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Fittingly, Frey uses a hard-boiled, under-punctuated, Hemingway type of nonstyle that seems to growl, I’m giving you the straight dope here, son. (A sample: “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. He worked in an auto body shop and she worked as a clerk at a gas station and they were going to get married and buy a house …”)

There are four main story lines. One concerns a $20-million-a-movie married superstar who is secretly gay. Another involves a teenage couple who run away from home in small-town Ohio to work service-level jobs in L.A. There’s also a mildly demented homeless man who finds purpose when he meets a meth-addicted runaway. And there’s Esperanza, a maid who makes a love connection with her psychotically mean boss’s nice, nerdy son.

These stories have two things in common. One, they take place in L.A. Two, they are all clichés. Frey has less fear of cliché, or of sentimentality, or of stating the obvious, than almost any other writer I have ever read. He literally writes as if he personally discovered that show-biz people are fake, homeless people can have hearts of gold, love can bridge any divide, and people go to L.A. to watch their dreams die.

And yet. Compare Bright Shiny Morning with, say, Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, a novel of similar proportions and ambitions (it’s about Las Vegas) that was published in January to great critical acclaim. Children drips with nuance and high purpose and psychological complexity, but in all honesty, I would far rather spend an evening (or a morning) with Morning than with Children. The worst bits of Morning are probably worse than anything else you’ll read this year, but Frey is such a relentlessly entertaining storyteller that you just won’t care. Sure, the setups are formulaic (ironically, Frey makes fun of Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, while his aren’t much better), but the details are pure over-the-top pulp, and they go by so fast you don’t have time to roll your eyes. Frey has a history of having a little too much fun with facts, among other controlled substances. As a writer of fiction, he may finally have found a job where that’s not a problem.

[ click to read review at TIME.com ]

CLICK HERE TO BUY BRIGHT SHINY MORNING @ AMAZON.COM

I fucking love England.

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=6148987

Outside the crime genre (Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley) and the novels of John Fante, Charles Bukowski has stood alone as the great fictional chronicler of Los Angeles life. Until now. Brilliant though he is, his novels do not have the ambition, scope and pin-sharp execution of James Frey’s truly exceptional debut novel, Bright Shiny Morning.

From the grotesquely ostentatious lifestyles of the super-rich to the panhandling itinerants of Venice Beach, Frey has brought us a huge array of LA characters and pulled together a brilliant and multi-faceted portrait of the City of Angels, combining snippets of fact and history with multiple fictional threads to produce a mind-blowing work of fiction.

Harsh reality, humour, extreme violence and moments of the utmost tenderness can all be found here in a virtuoso novel that is sure to resonate for many years to come as the first great LA novel. A modern masterpiece of American fiction, which should have DeLillo, McCarthy and other American fiction heavyweights pondering on the sudden arrival of a stranger in their midst.

Sara Nelson, the esteemed Editor-In-Chief of Publishers Weekly, calls my new book un-put-downable, a real page turner, and a train wreck. Thanks Sara. See review below, or see it here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6550529.html?nid=2286&source=title&rid=532399248

And if you want to see me read from my un-put-downable, page-turning, train wreck of a novel, here’s my tour schedule: http://bigjimindustries.com/wordpress/index.php/2008/04/tour-schedule/ 

- posted by JF 

Reviewed by Sara Nelson 

Bright Shiny Morning

James Frey. Harper, $26.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-06-157313-2 

When James Frey imploded as a memoirist in 2006, many said his A Million Little Pieces should have been—and perhaps initially was—presented as a novel, and that Frey—a sometimes screenwriter—was, both by nature and design, a fiction writer. Bright Shiny Morning is his first official book of fiction. If it’s not quite a novel, less believable in its way than his “augmented” memoir ever was, there’s no doubt it’s a work of Frey’s imagination. Ironic, isn’t it? 

Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Bright Shiny Morning is not a cohesive narrative but a compilation of vignettes of several characters (if this were a memoir, we’d call them “composites”) who have come to the city to fulfill their dreams. Some examples: Dylan and Maddie, madly-in-love Midwestern runaways who survive through the kindness of near strangers; Esperanza, a Mexican-American maid tortured by a body that could have been drawn by R. Crumb; a group of drunks and junkies who create a community behind the shacks on Venice Beach; Amberton Parker, a hugely famous married movie star who is secretly—you guessed it—gay. Interspersed with these rotating portraits are random historical and statistical factoids (which better have been fact-checked, even if there is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink disclaimer up front: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable”) about L.A.: that, for example, “approximately 2.7 million people live without health insurance” and “there are more than 12,000 people who describe their job as bill collector in the City of Los Angeles.” Frey’s intention, it seems, is to create an onomatopoetic jumble, a cacophony of facts and fiction, stats and stories, that replicate the contradictory nature of the place they describe. 

I expect, given the sharpness of the knives that some critics have out for Frey, that many will say the book flat out doesn’t work. First off, there’s that voice, the hyperbolic, breathless, run-on, word-repeating voice that was much better suited to a memoir (or even a novel) in which the hero was a hyperbolic, breathless alcoholic and drug addict. And then there’s the frat-boy swagger that angered some readers of AMLP turning up here, too, so faux-cynical as to be naïve: the gang father’s attaboy about his five-year-old son’s desire to be a cold-blooded killer, and the prurient, adolescent take on sex. (And couldn’t someone have stopped him from exclaiming “woohoo” after some of his “fun” and “not fun” factoids?) 

Yet the guy has something: an energy, a drive, a relentlessness, maybe, that can pull readers along, past the voice, past the stock characters, past the clichés. Bright Shiny Morning is a train wreck of a novel, but it’s un-put-downable, a real page-turner—in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition. 

Sara Nelson is the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly.