Bright Shiny Morning
James Frey Harper
Dh88
James Frey has all the trappings of a great writer. He waxes lyrical. He experiments with form. He tackles grand subjects. And he is possessed of a confidence in his talent that allowed him to remain undaunted in the face of the most thorough public literary shaming in recent memory. In late 2005, Frey was doing about as well as any writer can do, commercially. He had written two best-selling memoirs, which were in turn optioned to be films. He was being hailed in circles high and low as a fresh voice on the American scene. And his first book, A Million Little Pieces, had been selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club—an anointment that virtually guarantees an author's popularity and financial security, even if he never writes another word.
After several websites elucidated the untruths in both A Million Little Pieces and its follow-up, My Friend Leonard, Frey's situation looked perilous. The worm truly turned when Oprah had him on her show for a second time. Rather than conducting an explanatory interview - as the appearance had apparently been presented to Frey - Oprah rounded on both Frey and his well-respected publisher Nan Talese in a rather grubby fashion. He was a liar, and no explanation was in order: Oprah had to save face in a colossal way, and did so by excoriating Frey for the duration of the hour-long show.
After being pilloried by the queen of American television, Frey slunk from public view for a while. Then, surprising many, he turned up with not only another book deal but a "major" one with a respectable house, major being publishing code for north of $500,000 (Dh1.8million). Reactions ranged from outrage to bewilderment. Still, some saw the deal - and the publisher's very willingness to consort with a man so sullied in the mind of the reading public - as evidence that the forthcoming book must be good.
The book, Bright Shiny Morning, is sprawling, multifaceted and episodic, much like it's implicit subject: the city of Los Angeles. For his epic Frey has called up from central casting the familiar panoply of stock LA characters and their attendant personalities. There is the over-educated Hispanic maid and the rich, demonic white lady for whom she works. There is the wise, homeless drunk and the jaded, drug-addicted teenager he tries to help. There is the handsome, closeted movie star. And, of course, there is the wide-eyed couple fleeing their dead-end life in America's hinterland.
The most abiding problem with Bright Shiny Morning has to do with its relation to its subject, which, despite being represented by various avatars, remains LA itself. It is plausible to argue that no one knows what Los Angeles means. It has long had a mythic place in the American imagination, and it has likewise always been an elusive task to capture the multiplicity of the city between covers. Other writers have fallen in love with the subject of Los Angeles. Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Mike Davis, MFK Fisher and Aldous Huxley have all found themselves fascinated by the city's character and characters. However, in Bright Shiny Morning, Frey looks at the city with more lust than love. He has been seduced by Los Angeles, and is enamoured with its superficial aspects. He has an idea - much of it borrowed - of what Los Angeles is, and is unwilling to allow that the city may not, in reality, resemble his hackneyed notion of it. Accordingly, he has produced a book that is a litany of superficialities with very little of anything that resembles depth. In lieu of creating a deep, true story, Frey goes big. Bright Shiny Morning has all the characteristics of an over-budget Hollywood blockbuster with script issues. In fact, it often reads like a treatment for Crash 2.
There are also quotidian mistakes that reveal Frey's lack of familiarity with Southern California. He refers to the town of Ojai as coastal when it is really in the foothills 15 miles inland. In a self-satisfied disquisition about how Los Angelenos place a "the" in front of the numbers of roads - as in "the 405 freeway" - he finishes with a flourish discussing "the PCH," which is short for Pacific Coast Highway, in fact the only road that doesn't get a "the" attached to it. These are picayune mistakes, but they indicate a larger misapprehension of what LA means and how its residents live.
To say that there are books better than Frey's on Los Angeles would be to discount the fact that there are single sentences better on Los Angeles. Joan Didion, for instance, cut more to the quick of the city in many of her passages than Frey managed to in 500 pages. It's hard not to have an ineffable sense of LA after reading, "California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried, ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky is where we run out of continent." In that short passage Didion goes a long way toward distilling the elegiac anxiety that pervades LA. While it may be that no one knows what LA means, there are certainly those, James Frey not among them, who know how it feels.
The book also suffers from an overuse of literary devices. They are too numerous to list, but the most persistent is the prefacing of each chapter with a passing fact like, "In 1871, the Farmers and Merchants Bank is founded by John G Downey and Isaias Hellman. It is the first incorporated bank in Los Angeles County" or "In 1968, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic Primary." (Ostensibly, these are true, but Frey coyly prefaces the novel with a disclaimer reading, "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable," a nod, no doubt, to his past troubles.) There are also full chapters devoted to things like the names of street gangs and listings of the names, ranks and dates of death of soldiers from the LA area that have been killed in the Gulf War.
Most maddeningly, Frey has the habit of repeating phrases in a solemn manner, seeming to believe that mere repetition will conjure profundity. It only takes a few sentences like, "He pulled out turned west and started driving toward the glow it was thousands of miles away, he started driving towards the glow", and "Amberton falls in love, he falls in love, falls in love", to engender repetition of the eye-rolling sort. And there are his issues with punctuation: he plays fast and loose with it, to say the least. Commas are scarce. Not one of these gimmicks pays off in the way of meaning or atmosphere, and after a while the book's relationship to the reader starts to feel downright adversarial.
Amid the ruckus surrounding A Million Little Pieces, Frey and many of his apologists put forth the notion that, to some degree, whether or not something is strictly true is less important than its literary merit, its power to compel a reader. To some extent, this is a defensible position. For instance, Mary McCarthy originally wrote her episodic memoir Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood in serial form in The New Yorker. When she collected these pieces into a book, McCarthy went back, attempted to verify her recollections and ended each chapter with a note on the veracity of her memories. Often, the way she remembered events was simply not the way they could have occurred.Had she not done this, the pieces as they ran in the magazine would surely have retained their power.
(Of course, one salient difference between Frey's misdeeds and the fallibility of recollection is the intent. While nearly no one expects a memoirist to be able to remember exact details for decades, succumbing to the haziness of retrospection is far different from concocting not only details but reportedly whole characters for the sake of a sexier book.) Frey's memoirs failed not because they stretched - or, as some would say, betrayed - the truth. They failed by being poorly written. Of course, to a large extent, the value of a memoir resides in the events it describes. Style matters, but much can be forgiven if the story is compelling. A novel must answer to a higher literary standard, which Bright Shiny Morning fails to do. Thus, Frey has written himself into a lose/lose situation: his memoirs are not true and his novel falls short. He may have acquired the posture of the voice of his literary generation, but let's hope he is not.
Brian Thomas Gallagher is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Bookforum, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.