Reactions to story from The New York Times
Books of The Times: Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way
http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 05/ 12/ books/ 12masl.htmlReactions / posts that link to this article
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Tale of two books
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/05/tale_of_two_books....Actually it's just one book, the new novel set in Los Angeles by fabulist James Frey. But look at how differently it's being read. LAT Book Editor David Ulin holds nothing back: "Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever
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BROTD
http://edcone.typepad.com/wordup/2008/05/brotd.htmlBad Review of the Day, by David Ulin in the LAT, on James Frey's new novel: "Bright Shiny Morning" is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read...an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining.
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The 405
http://paxonymous.blogspot.com/2008/07/405.html"Interstate 405, the San Diego Freeway, or, the 405. Someone in the State of California's naming office was smoking weed when they named this road because it doesn't run within forty miles of San Diego. It's almost as if they felt sorry for San Diego for not having any big famous roads on the scale of the roads in LA, so they decided to throw them a bone and give them the 405. Lucky for them, no one in Los Angeles gives a shit, and no one in Los Angeles even bothers with the misleading and entirely inaccurate given name. The big sixteen-lane north/south artery, infamous as the scene of the OJ Simpson slow-speed car chase of June 17, 1994, is and always will be known as the 405. ...Driving on the 405 is like standing in line for a roller coaster. You dread the line, you know you have to deal with it, you get in it, and then you slowly inch your way forward for what seems like an eternity. It's always hot, something always smells, and you always regret having decided to get in the line. Unlike a roller-coaster line, however, there is usually no payoff when you get off the 405. Whether you're getting on another highway, freeway or interstate, or getting on one of Los Angeles's larger surface streets, the only thing you get is more traffic. More traffic. More f'ing traffic." -JF Great description. In the photo above, the Getty is on that hill (cool view from the museum). UCLA is a little east (right; you can get a nice view of Century City et al. off Hilgard) of those white buildings down yonder, off Wilshire (sheeshah or cookies, peut-etre?) or Sunset (sushi on the Strip?).
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FREY COOKS
http://www.carpemedium.net/2008/07/fry-cooks/Declaring herself the Queen of All Media (no, not him) this bitch took it upon herself to give me a rapid-fire series of nasty spanks on national television. (Incidentally, what the hell does she know about literature?) It hurt. But boy, oh boy, now I’m more confused than ever. I muster up the courage to write a new book (fiction, this time), and Janet Maslin gives me a boner of a review. “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.” Six weeks later, Walter Kirn delivers a whooping second only to Oprah. No, make that worse — more like an all-out ass-stomping. I have the welts on my butt to prove it. “Frey provides a World Book’s worth of trivia concerning the geography, demographics and social history of Los Angeles. “In 1895, all 23 of the incorporated banks in Los Angeles County are robbed at least once.” “In 1968, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.” These inserts are supposed to have an ironic, ominous quality that haunts and complicates the imagined stories. Instead they remind us, repeatedly and naggingly, of the thinness of Frey’s inventions, which rival them for arid tedium, proving that this stranger to the truth is also, at least for the moment, a stranger to fiction.” I could get mad, but instead, I’m all kinds of sad. Kirn’s a talented guy, and hell, anyone who has the balls to marry someone so closely related to Margot Kidder has gotta be braver than any addict turning himself over to rehab. –James Frey, as told to Heather Hartman in a Sudafed-induced dream sequence
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http://brightyear.typepad.com/bright_year/2008/07/ive-been-s...
I've been surprised by the all the kerfuffle around the happenstance of Janet Maslin and Walter Kirn giving two very different opinions of JFrey's Bright Shiny Morning. Maslin loved the book, saying "He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park," in a review that she writes in an imitation of his style (oh Maslin I feel for you; whenever I read something that appeals to me, I tend to imitate the writer myself. But this doesn't really wash, is not helpful, or particularly principled, when you're writing a review of that person's book. It actually seems childish, and weird.) Kirn on the other hand, saying, "His 'novel,' which isn’t made up enough, is stupefying.
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NYTBR Finally Wakes Up to Bright Shiny Morning
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/lit_crit/nytbr_finally_...When it comes to NY Times Book Review bashing, I have mixed feelings about the "why does it take them forever to review some books?" attack, because I do believe there's a good argument to be made for being able to consider a book, and render a critical assessment, at one's own pace, without concerning oneself with publication dates and retail windows of opportunity. If you're going to take that approach, though, the insight brought to the text ought to be worth the wait, and it's true that the Review has displayed a recurring problem covering a certain kind of "hot" nonfiction title in either a timely or particularly insightful fashion. The problem, then, isn't why it takes them so long to review some books, but why certain books rate barely perfunctory coverage, delivered long after most critics and readers have moved on. Unfortunately, Walter Kirn's review of Bright Shiny Morning in yesterday's NYTBR shows that the problem extends to fiction titles as well. Oh, it's a perfectly fine 1,076-word review—or, rather, it would've been perfectly fine back in early May, when Janet Maslin had her 933-word say. Unfortunately, Kirn (who is usually one of the recurring bright spots in the Review pages) doesn't do much with his extra 143 words; he just tells us that James Frey is a terrible novelist, which is pretty much what everybody except Maslin was telling us when the book came out. I haven't read the novel, and though I'll admit to some curiosity, so many books have been added to my to-read pile in the last two months that I don't foresee reading it any time soon, but if I were still unresolved, does this review bring any significant new insight to help me decide? New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media
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My Hero
http://jonsealy.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-hero.htmlJames Frey has finally published a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and because we're in love with comeback stories, it's gotten a lot of attention. I couldn't read much of A Million Little Pieces, not because I was offended that he made some of it up, but because it was poorly written. From page one his prose was clunky and uninteresting. This is why I'm usually not a fan of memoirs--bad writers like Frey are able to hide behind the protective labeling, and because it's "true," readers are more willing to forgive a writer his faults. No more! Now that Frey's writing fiction, all his dirty little faults are laid bare. In the NY Times, Walter Kirn reviews Frey's novel, and he blasts it for its use of language: Here is some of Frey’s prose, ladled up from the huge pitcher in which he has blended events, ideas, dialogue and dozens of pages of Wikipedian trivia relating to everything from Los Angeles’s freeways to its neighborhoods and street gangs into a sort of verbal fruit smoothie every sip of which has the same consistency. This passage deals with Dylan eating supper in the flea-bag motel room where he and Maddie have landed after pursuing the elusive glow. “When he finishes his first helping he gets another, he finishes that gets another. While he’s working on the third she puts the pie in the oven warms it up. By the time’s finished with his fourth, and the bucket of chicken is empty, she has a piece of warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream ready for him. He eats most of it with his hands when he’s done he licks the plate clean he has another does the same thing. When he’s finished he leans back in his chair, rubs his stomach, speaks.” This is Frey’s stab at adopting the house style of the contemporary American desert. Uninflected, flat and shadowless, it’s meant to communicate, one understands from an acquaintance with California novels by the likes of Joan Didion, James Ellroy and Bret Easton Ellis, among others, the dehydrated, present-tense barrenness of life in a city of brutal superficiality. This point is not new, nor is this manner of making it, but the least one can ask of a writer who can’t resist is that he maintain some sense of timing and showmanship — that he keep his act snappy since it can’t be fresh. This review is a nice contrast to the Times's earlier review of the same book, a review written in the same style as the book (which in itself is enough to keep me far from the novel). Unfortunately, the book will probably sell quite well because there is no bad press, but I can't imagine that many readers will actually finish it.
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Bright Shiny Morning
http://emonome.com/emon/books/bright-shiny-morning/I knew of him and not of his work when I watched him get flogged on television by Oprah. I happily shared the South Park parody with my friends and still had read nothing by him. I recognized him when I crossed his path, briefly one evening, downtown - Broadway, almost near Houston St - couple of years ago. When I told my friend later he screamed into the phone, “You didn’t say anything to him?!” Like what? I’ll admit that the hype had gotten to me and I did pick up a copy of “A Million Little Pieces” to see what everyone was talking about; almost all agree that it’s a page turner, true to the term. I couldn’t do it. Too many unrealistic expectations bore the effort. Why do I care if he said the truth or not? Book went back to the library. “Oh the public was tricked” “Oh The Oprah was tricked” “Oh the lives of people have been scarred because of the lies.” If shit walked and talked and talked more shit. I’ve never went after a book from reading a review of it. Made an exception after this one by Janet Maslin. After the shit he’s been through - or put through - how did he manage to come back and win? I’ll tell you. It took me less than a week to finish Bright Shiny Morning. Much less I like to think. To use Maslin’s analogy, he did ‘hit one out of the park’. First few pages were tough but man knows how to fucking write. It will piss off purists and writing teachers. It will definitely piss off writing teachers. Try interjecting in the middle of a scene with “(…it’s all about the motherfucking sequels)” and pass that class. Try using “he spoke” and “she spoke” before each spoken line. What is it…pure talent, or hard work that makes simplicity conjure up such vivid imagery without sacrificing heart? I don’t know. The stories unfold so quickly in these pages and take deep breaths for chapters on that you no longer realize it’s not happening in front of your eyes. My favorite out of the stories is Dylan and Maddie’s. When you read it, you’ll probably understand why. You’ll probably understand why the emotions felt by the characters are not strange for you to recognize. Come to this book with a clean slate and pretend you have no idea who the guy is. He has his press-friendly blurb for writing it…but I think this book is a ‘fuck you’ book. It’s a fuck-you to convention, it’s a fuck-you to celebrity, and it’s a fuck-you to reviewers like this. You like fuck-you work? I like fuck-you work. Perhaps also not strange that I haven’t felt so energized about writing myself. Even if it’s writing a fuck-you-I’ve-just-read-this-book blog post. Even if it makes me stay up an extra 15 minutes to write a page of a script that had only those 15 minutes to live true. If it inspires, it was written from somewhere pure. If it doesn’t, you may just not be ready for it. I’m ready for A Million Little Pieces.
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Oh Baby, Give Me One More Chance.
http://weareallgrandkids.com/archives/29I feel as if I’ve made about twenty trips to twenty different places in the past 24 hours. The burden of the endless errand sits perched upon my shoulder. As I landed back at my apartment, I had one of those slow-motion realizations that I am going to have to drive another 30 miles later this evening due to my own forgetfulness. All of this just to leave town for a couple of days… Yesterday, in between bouts of coughing up all sorts of new colors, I learned a new lesson: Never turn your back on an animal, even if he has a pretty nifty name like Sundance. Today’s lesson came while sitting in traffic as the air conditioner blasted stale, warm air across my face in lieu of cool, comforting relief. Apparently, I should have listened one particular voice inside my head when I had my new stereo installed in my car this past winter. I had done some research on doing the installation at home on my car model and found that several people had inadvertently disconnected the AC in the process and written guides on how to avoid that situation. On the day I took my car in to have the stereo installed, I kept having visions of no air conditioning once the summer heat finally hit Washington. As I filled out my paperwork and handed over the keys to my vehicle, I must have begun the same sentence at least one hundred times in my head that would just toss those “car stereo professionals” a small concern I had with the air conditioning, but I never actually formed the words with my mouth. As I stepped out of the garage and back into the frozen Christmas-time air, I gave one last look at my vehicle, shivered and thought, “These guys know what they’re doing…” and closed the door behind me. Fuckers… I used the lack of air conditioning and the fact that all three stores I visited today did not carry the magazine I was looking for as an excuse to purchase James Frey’s newest novel, Bright Shiny Morning. I really haven’t been in much of a mood to spend money on hardcover books as of late, but I justified the purchase by reasoning that I was going to buy a magazine anyway and there was really only a 17 dollar price difference after tax… I’m definitely not one of those people that gives a shit whatsoever that James Frey exaggerated the truth in his first novel, nor have I ever cared that Oprah Winfrey gave him the verbal strong hand on her show a few years ago in retaliation. Despite the fact that aspects of his memoir may or may not be completely truthful, he wrote a captivating novel that got my attention and kept it. I really don’t care if it happened or not. The second that people get over putting artists on some sort of higher moral pedestal and admit that they make the same asshole mistakes that everyone else does, the better off we will all be. As I made a stop by my parents’ house this afternoon, I was presented with an opportunity to sit at the piano and write in the comfort of a silent and empty home. There are few pleasures as sweet as that. Tomorrow, I take leave of this wretched city… - - - - - Currently Listening To: Girl Talk / Feed The Animals
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James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/the-hollywood-deal/2008...They see producers, agents, managers, writers, other actors and actresses, studio executives, moguls. Despite the fact that many of these people absolutely despise each other, they look like they are all in love, deeply, truly and wildly in love. Kiss on the cheek, pat on the back, give me a hug, buddy, let's take a picture. And then, please please please go straight to the restroom and fuck yourself. James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning It's become a commonplace observation that a public scourging is as often as not, a great career move. And with his above-cited novel lingering among the country's top 150 sellers (it's been as high as #43 on the USA Today list, shortly after its May 22 publication date) it's hard to say that James Frey, 39, hasn't benefited in some way from his notoriety. But oh, what notoriety. The New York Times' David Carr (of whom more below) observed after a cataclysmic mea culpa appearance on Oprah that the talk show host, once Frey's greatest admirer, had "snapped [Frey and publisher Nan Talese] in two like dry winter twigs." Oprah ended an extended denunciation of Frey's not-entirely-true memoir A Million Little Pieces by declaring, "I believe the truth matters," to what Carr described as thunderous, though he may as well have said vindictive, applause. Frey gives a pained chuckle when asked about the "just spell the name right" theory: "I would never want to go through that again. People go, `Hey, any press is good press' and I just laugh and go, `God, you don't know'." One wonders how Frey managed to sit up, dust himself off, and craft a 501-page novel in reasonably short order after his time being publicly pelted with rocks. "Whatever happened, happened," he said, "and often you don't choose what happens to you in life--you just deal with whatever it is. I wouldn't want to go through that again, and I don't take pride in some of the mistakes that I made. But I live with it and move on I write the best books I can." There was no guarantee when he sat down to write the Times' Janet Maslin would write a section-fronting review, using his peculiar novelistic diction, and summarizing what he'd done this way: 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. She applauded his rather random samplings of factoids about a banana museum and gang populations --"even the stray facts had their artistry" and forgave a streak of earnestness-- "So what if the book always made poor people humble decent better than rich spoiled profligate ones?", going on to conclude: And it worked. That's how James Frey saved himself. The Los Angles Times' David Ulin was pretty much in the opposing camp, calling the new work "execrable" and "a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining," but Frey got a friendly and observant feature in the same paper, as he strolled about his former stomping grounds near the beach. He also had the ongoing consolation of the more than decent sales figures A Million Little Pieces (and a similarly truthy follow-up, My Friend Leonard) enjoyed, whether for their intrinsic storytelling merits or via the market stimulus that came via all the controversy. For Frey, the money isn't key, but the audience is all-important: Yeah, I've done all right. When people ask me about money, I always say if I could get paid ten bucks and have a million people read my book or get paid a million bucks and have ten people read my book I'd take the ten bucks and the million people every time. I don't do what I do for money if I was doing something purely for cash I'd be a banker. I write books because I love books. As a look at his wardrobe as seen on book jackets will attest, Frey estimates he spends $300 a year on clothes, and he's still driving the Toyota 4 Runner he's had since he was 22. Born and raised in Ohio, he lives in Soho with his family, and admits to a second home in the culturati playground Amagansett on Long Island. But as he attests in his novel, "Artists have always had an uncomfortable relationship with money ... the lifestyle is far harder, lonelier and more boring than can be imagined." Frey's reviled memoir was very much present in the mind of the Times' Carr when he set out to write his own memoir, The Night of the Gun, a hair-raising (and often hilarious, sometimes touching) skein of scarifying anecdotes that should cause something of a sensation when it's published in August. Carr got a reported $300,000 for the book, which he richly earns not just with its entertaining, cockeyed charms but for the complete exposure he subjects his bad, former self to. Crackhead, batterer, bad dad, and all around loadee, he's unsparing in his self-laceration but moving in his determination. Although both Carr and Fey fit the modern profile of bi-coastal beings, there's still a certain geographical divide Frey outlines in his book: The process by which literary and theatrical names form the East coast are snapped up by a Hollywood that's hungry for respectability. "There is a phenomenon," he writes, of "many a promising playwright turned into a TV hack, novelist into mumbling screenwriter stage actor intro preening sitcom star, and theater director into director of soap commercials." As Frey's notoriety turned him from memoirist to fabulist, he was detached from his agent and publisher, but neither Hollywood nor the editors at his current publishing house, Harper Collins, had a problem with that. He's got a screenplay handed in to director Tony Scott, (for whom he has nothing but praise) based on the autobiography of Hell's Angel leader Sonny Barger, and more book ideas. (When pressed, he won't disavow the notion of a novel of manners set in his posh Long Island enclave.) As much optimism and civic spirit as Frey shows in his novel, which lays out four plot lines that he pointedly doesn't interweave in the fashion of Short Cuts or Crash, there's a dark underbelly to Frey's Los Angles. For some of the characters there is violence in the offing, but the sternest portrait is of "public heterosexual ... private homosexual" movie star Amberton Parker, a mélange of corrupt movie star tendencies who moves from starring in a row of action vehicles ("If they're evil, and are threatening America, he kills them. Kills them dead") to becoming a cinematic "Symbol of truth, and justice, honesty, and integrity." It's Amberton and his (also privately gay) wife Casey who observe the premiere described at the top of this column, and when his love object--a college sports star turned agent--threatens to cut him loose, Casey direly warns, "Your job is to service us. Your past as some sort of college football superhero, while interesting and sort of cue, is meanings to people how are as famous as we are...If we want you fired, it can be done with a phone call... because people all over the world pay money to see us." It's more description than invective, insists Frey: "I look at the film industry in what I believe is a very realistic way. It can be a very brutal, ugly unforgiving place, and it's all about money. If you go into it thinking it's about anything else, you're gonna get roughed up. So when I go to L.A. to do a job or I take a job in he industry, I go in knowing what I'm getting myself into. The film industry is a place where here's massive money and massive fame and I think of that of being indicting of those things more than it is the industry itself." None of this is to say Frey's not enjoying his trips to the West Coast. He staged a rock and roll book reading in cooperation with a young metal group called Black Tide, that resulted in eight arrests at the Whiskey on Sunset, and recently he stopped by the Chateau Marmont and accidentally ran into photographer Terry Richardson (his collaborator on a photo-and-text limited edition based on the novel), and began partying with him, Pamela Anderson, and some Hells Angels of their mutual acquaintance. "That could only happen in LA, he approvingly notes. Unlike a thuggy foreign-born hit man who more than anything wants a SAG card and tries to help Amberton out of a jam, Frey doesn't close his interview by saying, `Go away little man with voice machine and pencil. You disappear now.'" Instead, he summarizes how he stayed on his feet despite that very pubic beating that came in the wake of A Million Little Pieces: "I'm a writer. That's what I do, and the only thing I know how to do. You try to focus word by word, and sentence by sentence. I just needed to get back to work. I always say, and people laugh but it's true, that everybody has bad times at work and everybody has bad days. And bad years. I had a really bad year. But that doesn't mean you quit or you walk away. You do your best to get through it and go back to work." (James Frey, July 2006; photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage) Related Links A Million Little Dollars, and Then Some Real Payday for Fake Memoirist Frey Dan Rather's 70 Million Little Pieces
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