{"id":300,"date":"2008-04-14T13:11:57","date_gmt":"2008-04-14T20:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/04\/my-train-wreck\/"},"modified":"2010-04-02T09:13:19","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T16:13:19","slug":"my-train-wreck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/14\/my-train-wreck\/","title":{"rendered":"My Train Wreck"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a><\/u><\/font><\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/u><\/font>And if you want to see me read from my un-put-downable, page-turning, train wreck of a novel, here\u2019s my tour schedule: http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/04\/tour-schedule\/<\/a><\/u><\/font><\/span><\/font>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

– posted by JF<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>\"Publisher's<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Sara Nelson\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bright Shiny Morning <\/em><\/p>\n

James Frey. Harper, $26.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-06-157313-2<\/p>\n

When James Frey imploded as a memoirist in 2006, many said his\u00a0A Million Little Pieces<\/em>\u00a0should have been\u2014and perhaps initially was\u2014presented as a novel, and that Frey\u2014a sometimes screenwriter\u2014was, both by nature and design, a fiction writer.\u00a0Bright Shiny Morning<\/em>\u00a0is his first official book of fiction. If it\u2019s not quite a novel, less believable in its way than his \u201caugmented\u201d memoir ever was, there\u2019s no doubt it\u2019s a work of Frey\u2019s imagination. Ironic, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Set in contemporary Los Angeles,\u00a0Bright Shiny Morning<\/em>\u00a0is not a cohesive narrative but a compilation of vignettes of several characters (if this were a memoir, we\u2019d call them \u201ccomposites\u201d) 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\u2014you guessed it\u2014gay. 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: \u201cNothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable\u201d) about L.A.: that, for example, \u201capproximately 2.7 million people live without health insurance\u201d and \u201cthere are more than 12,000 people who describe their job as bill collector in the City of Los Angeles.\u201d Frey\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I expect, given the sharpness of the knives that some critics have out for Frey, that many will say the book flat out doesn\u2019t work. First off, there\u2019s 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\u2019s the frat-boy swagger that angered some readers of AMLP turning up here, too, so faux-cynical as to be na\u00efve: the gang father\u2019s attaboy about his five-year-old son\u2019s desire to be a cold-blooded killer, and the prurient, adolescent take on sex. (And couldn\u2019t someone have stopped him from exclaiming \u201cwoohoo\u201d after some of his \u201cfun\u201d and \u201cnot fun\u201d factoids?)<\/p>\n

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 clich\u00e9s.\u00a0Bright Shiny Morning<\/em>\u00a0is a train wreck of a novel, but it\u2019s un-put-downable, a real page-turner\u2014in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition.<\/p>\n

Sara Nelson is the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s my tour schedule: http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/04\/tour-schedule\/\u00a0 – posted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversation-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}