{"id":409,"date":"2008-05-11T20:52:57","date_gmt":"2008-05-12T03:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/05\/new-york-times-raves-over-bright-shiny-morning\/"},"modified":"2010-04-02T09:11:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T16:11:07","slug":"new-york-times-raves-over-bright-shiny-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/11\/new-york-times-raves-over-bright-shiny-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Times Raves Over BRIGHT SHINY MORNING"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

May 12, 2008<\/p>\n

BOOKS OF THE TIMES<\/nyt_kicker><\/p>\n

Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/p>\n

By\u00a0JANET MASLIN<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING\u00a0<\/a>By James Frey<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/h4>\n

<\/a><\/nyt_text><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He waited. They forgot about him. He tried again.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/p>\n

In the 1930s Los Angeles is the film capital of the world.\u00a0F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/a>, author of \u201cThe Great Gatsby,\u201d comes to live there. He tries to write movies. He fails. He writes a Hollywood novel, \u201cThe Last Tycoon.\u201d He says there are no second acts in American lives. He turns out to be wrong.<\/p>\n

The million little pieces guy was called\u00a0James Frey<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Like this: The Los Angeles area has a museum devoted to the banana.<\/p>\n

James Frey loved\u00a0Jack Kerouac<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Charles Bukowski<\/a>\u00a0and maybe even\u00a0John Fante<\/a>\u00a0but he didn\u2019t sound like them, he didn\u2019t 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\u2019s broken dreams.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t get that, then what they got instead. He looked into their hearts. But he didn\u2019t 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\u2019s what they all wanted. Bright Shiny Morning. So he made that the name of the book.<\/p>\n

His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force. (Look, somebody had to, if only to create a comeback drama.) But that wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Still, even the stray facts had their artistry. They helped turn this book into the captivating urban kaleidoscope that, most recently, Charles Bock\u2019s \u201cBeautiful Children\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Even the one-sentence page had its use here.<\/p>\n

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 vicu\u00f1a. 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

There were easy ways a cynical, sentimental crybaby like the million little pieces guy could have told Esperanza\u2019s part of the story. Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that\u2019s what he knew about. That\u2019s what he wrote about. That\u2019s what he passed off as nonfiction. That\u2019s why he sounded as if he\u2019d seen too many lousy movies.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And it worked.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how James Frey saved himself.<\/p>\n

<\/nyt_update_bottom><\/p>\n

[ click to read review in the New York Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times May 12, 2008 BOOKS OF THE TIMES Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way By\u00a0JANET MASLIN BRIGHT SHINY MORNING\u00a0By 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. […]<\/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":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversation-information","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","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=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}