Bright glaring disappointment

This review is forthcoming in the Korea Herald.

Bright Shiny Morning

By James Frey

Pp. 502

HarperCollins 2008

It is one of the sadder tales in modern publishing history.

It goes like this: a man, James Frey, writes a book that is autobiographical in nature about addiction, about finding a way to make it through a dark spell. He tries to sell it as a novel, shopping it around to publishers and they all pass on it.

So he re-brands it, calls it a memoir, says the story is “true,” and naturally a major publishing house bites. He gets a contract and the book is released. It sells modestly until a media mogul, a woman who reaches people primarily through a television show, tells her audience that it is a great story of recovery. She puts her stamp of approval on it and the sales figures skyrocket.

The writer gets rich and noticed. In fact, he receives too much attention – a website that is owned by a television station picks up the book and fact checks it. They find inconsistencies in his story and expose them.

The media mogul then asks the writer to come on her show and embarrasses him before a live television audience and millions of viewers at home. He loses his publisher, readers are offered refunds, and he is asked to write an apology to be added to the beginning of every book.

Then he decides to write a “novel.” It’s his attempt at American Literature in the modern sense, in the (shudder) New York City sense. He creates characters, he plots it, he weaves story lines, he stylizes the structure – and, most pointedly, he manufactures it in a way that obscures autobiography. Make no mistake, the book is not about him.

He tries to evoke a sense of place (Los Angeles) and make that place the canvass for his contrivances. It’s nothing if not ambitious, and no one’s going to publicly embarrass him this time. But the problem is the book doesn’t work at all. When playing it this safe and kowtowing to the modern publishing industry, writing what they consider a novel takes all the truth out of the story.

It’s not a poorly written book. His style is digestible; it is easy to tolerate his lack of punctuation and run-on sentences.

For an example of his writing here is Old Man Joe, a homeless man who is 38 but looks like he is in his 70s and lives in a bathroom:

“The boardwalk is loud, crowded, dirty, parking is a nightmare, it smells like fifty types of food, almost all of them fried. It is a world unto itself, and the homeless population is a world within that world.

It’s dawn and Old Man Joe is awake on the beach he’s staring at the sky slowly turning blue, it’s slowly turning blue. He came this morning with the hope that he would learn why, why but he hasn’t learned anything it is as it is every morning he’s learned nothing. It’s already warm somewhere in the mid-70s. The sand is cold against the exposed areas of his skin, his hands, his ankles, neck, the back of his head. There is a light breeze. The air is wet and clean and it smells like salt and tastes like the ocean he takes deep, slow breaths, holds them, exhales, takes another.”

BSM is structured with four unconnected storylines—the homeless man, an actor, a Mexican-American maid, and a young couple from Ohio—told in pieces, intermixed with historical facts, smaller stories and sociological concerns.

As Frey writes that L.A. has more artists, writers, etc. than any other city in the world it’s impossible not to think for now. Frey has said he was trying to put himself in the same fraternity as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Mailer and Bret Easton Ellis. Yet he ignores that all of those writers wanted their work to have a quality of permanence.

It’s almost as if Frey was proving to us that he had done his research, or that his research could make up for his lack of real expertise on the subject. The facts and figures, those dry parcels of information, might have been put to better use as unconscious or subliminal details that shaded the narrative and the characters, rather than merely bloating the length of the book.

I should have a greater understanding of L.A. because of the characters. But because Frey does not write from the perspective of common people, it’s hard to know the city. The novel would have benefited more from it just being the characters themselves--the people--than all those breaks in the action, all those facts and dates.

There isn’t anything Frey doesn’t think he can write about. He writes about surfers:

“Many grew up in landlocked states without salt water they saw surfing on TV or in videos they read magazines filled with pictures of long-haired men in shorts dripping wet surrounded by beautiful girls. Some tried it on family vacations and found themselves others have known it throughout the entirety of their lives. All of them find peace and joy alone on the water a serenity contentment to which they devote their lives.”

“All of them find peace and joy?” To even use words like that – serenity, contentment—what was he reading for research, a screenplay for a Hollywood film about two kids who move to L.A. from the Midwest and fall in love with the ocean? It’s a myth, and for all of Frey’s attempts to avoid clichés, he falls face first into too many.

One of the points of the story of L.A. is that it is a big, impenetrable city where people don’t just show up and make it big, much less understand it. Frey moved there from Cleveland and lived there for 8 years to make it as a writer. His story, though not in the novel, is also one of ambition and hope -- that moth-eaten idea of the American Dream. His ambition to become a “great novelist” isn’t that much different than the ambition of his characters, and it’s precisely what harms the novel.

Frey has said he merely tells stories and it’s ridiculous to have to worry about the designations, whether it’s a novel or a memoir. If that is indeed his stance, then I would think he would have written something closer to truth.

I would have loved the story of “Frey’s Redemption," and I’m happy for him that he came back from all that media persecution, but I’d be happier if this was a better book. I don’t see why he didn’t just try to do what “A Million Little Pieces” did again but call it a novel. He sold out to the world of “academic literature” and we’re all worse off. There was more truth in one page of AMLP than in this entire book.