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Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
Book Summary InformationAuthor: James Frey Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2008-05-13 ISBN: 0061573132 Number of pages: 512 Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of Bright Shiny MorningBook Review: Not so much, Mr. Frey Summary: 2 Stars
I liked 'A Million Little Pieces.' Even after I discovered that most of it was composed of lies. And I liked 'My Friend Leonard' as well. For what it was...the storytelling skill was there and they were both interesting enough to keep some momentum.
But I have to say that after looking at the overall star rating for this book, I'll never trust an Amazon rating again. It's disheartening to say the least that the first review listed is horrible yet it appears to have received the highest rating. If one were bold enough, one might suggest that Mr. Frey himself had written it. You know the style:
I read. I read and I read and I don't stop reading have to read. I speak. I am an intellect. I have read Faulkner, Hemmingway, I have read Camus and Sartre and all of the books their girlfriends wrote, letters, many letters and I keep reading.
Come on. Seriously.
I'll put it in very plain and simple terms why this book failed and why it does indeed read like a book that was written to fulfill a contractual obligation and nothing more. And to the zealots out there, I have nothing against Mr. Frey. I've already stated that I liked his previous efforts so back up. For real.
I honestly get the feeling that those reviewers who are swarming to defend this guy have such blind faith that they'd give 5 stars to anything Frey might scribble on the back of a cocktail napkin. Not a used cocktail napkin (he doesn't drink, you see...he's an addict. He's an addict, a criminal and a liar, by his own admission).
So anyway, this book fails on just about every level. It's like listening to stories told by a schizophrenic. And not in a good way.
Plots jump in an and out, tangled up by facts, figures, random entries, more random facts, good random facts, bad random facts...all about LA. There is no fluidity to any of the tales. It's like listening to someone with a speak impediment or a huge stutter tell a story that takes several days to tell. And by the time you hear the ending, you're so over the whole process that you care very little about the plot, the characters or the situations at all.
He thanks Ellis in the credits of the book. What Frey tried to do unsuccessfully was to capture a kind of 'Rules of Attraction' formula that just didn't work. Plain and simple.
IT DID NOT WORK in terms of literary composition. It didn't. I don't care what anyone says. I'm a reader. I read. That's what I do. Sometimes I teach from books and I teach about books and I teach and I teach.
(Sorry. Couldn't resist).
The huge downtime between the individual stories allows for the bodies to grow cold before you even have a chance to get to care about the characters at all. You're in. You're out. Two pages in, four pages in. Ten pages out. Back in.
I see what Frey was trying to do. I really do. It just didn't work. Plain and simple. I love books and I never skip pages of them, regardless of how bad they develop. I skipped all of the 'facts' pages. I skipped the random Camus journal-esque entries that had nothing to do with anything. I skipped quite a bit in fact because there simply wasn't enough there to make it interesting.
In the end, I felt had. Very had. Worse than after I learned that AMLP was fabricated.
I felt like I'd wasted several nights when I could have been reading something that I might have enjoyed. I was disappointed that Frey's first 'novel' was so confused and incoherent at times. I thought he might come out, guns blazing and prove the critics of his previous books wrong.
He didn't. Not with this effort. Not even close.
What we get (in a nutshell and without giving much away) is a Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Californication' mixed heavily with 'Hollywood Babylon.' Mix gingerly and serve chilled.
We get it. People are drawn to LA because of stars. There are a lot of drugs out there. There is a lot of sex, a lot of prostitution. A lot of broken dreams. If you are impressed or surprised by any of that, by all means pick up the book. If you liked the song, 'Californication' and thought it was deep or revealing, then by all means pick this book up.
It simply doesn't reveal anything. It simply repeats facts, tosses out random notes, reminds people that bad things are bad and bad things happen to good people in bad situations. Honestly. That's it. That's as deep and revealing as this novel gets.
I also couldn't shake the feeling that Frey has forgotten his voice since being publicly called out on AMLP. He's channeling a lot of different writers in this. He no longer has a signature feel to his writing except, of course, the run-on sentences and the exasperation that is supposed to help us feel the excitement or anxiety of his characters. And unfortunately, that's no longer enough to keep these weak plots afloat.
I particularly couldn't help but think about the film 'Magnolia' as I read through 'BSM.' If you've seen the movie and read (waded) through the book, you know what I mean.
It just doesn't work. It simply doesn't. And I'll debate anyone who thinks it does and accuse them of blindly following someone who touched them with an earlier, much better, much more successful effort in AMLP.
I read. I've read a lot of books. I read and I read and I read. I read Faulkner. I read Hemmingway. I read Camus and Sartre and all of the books that their girlfriends ever wrote. I read. I have to.
I read this book and found nothing interesting, revealing, insightful, moving or successful within in. Unfortunately. I wanted to like it. I did. I'm a reader. I read and I read an I read.
I'm never reading this again. It was a gigantic waste of time. And if this is what American literature has come to, looks like we're losing that battle along with all the other battles we've lost recently as a nation.
It just doesn't work.
Summary of Bright Shiny Morning One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel?a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original. Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines?some never to be seen again?but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home. Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.
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