Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
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Book Reviews of Bright Shiny Morning
Book Review: Literary Feast
Summary: 5 Stars
I never got caught up in the uproar surrounding James Frey's Oprah pick, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. I sat from afar, shaking my head thinking, "This guy jerked the wrong person and got caught. We'll never hear from him again." In the fallout, I do admit to being curious about the memoir, more from the standpoint of a rubbernecker with that unexplainable penchant to view a horrendous car wreck on the freeway, but I told myself I was an author, and authors don't support authors like Frey. I passed the crash, kept on driving. So when I came across a review in PEOPLE on Frey's newest, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, I only took a cursory glance. So I guess Literary Land does give a guy a second chance. Frey's latest endeavor: fiction. Perhaps it was still that need to view the collision that I scanned the review. Two words caught my attention: Los Angeles. I was hooked.
I was born and raised in L.A. county. While I've now lived in Idaho for 18 years, L.A. formed who I was/am today. L.A. is its own character on the map, a city that is . . . well, captured so well in Frey's book, I'm nearly at a loss on how to review it. At the risk of sounding like a completely smitten fan, there's really no other way for me to say it: BRIGHT SHINY MORNING is, to me, a literary feast.
Some may be turned off from the start with the rambling vignettes, the narrative, the run on sentences, the lack of punctuation. Almost like a new eyeglass prescription, the reader has to adjust to the style of the book, but once one learns to read each word independently, they fall into place. Frey omits the traditional format and doesn't indent anything. Doesn't use dialogue quotes, almost writes in a meandering manner that defies the publishing system. Ironic . . .
What sucked me in, were the historical facts of Los Angeles. These small pieces of information start the beginning of each chapter--which really aren't chapters, as there is no chapter numbers on anything. You simply move from scene to scene, much like a piece of trash floating on the Santa Anas, stopping here and there, to tell a story. One story. One hundred stories. One thousand stories. Of the millions of people who live in L.A. From the rich, to the poor, to the homeless, to the immigrants, to actors, musicians, the porn stars. Out of all the character vignettes, I probably got the biggest chuckle over the adult film industry folks. I was raised in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley; graduated from Chatsworth High with Val Kilmer and Kevin Spacey. 90% of all porn is filmed in the Valley--most in Chatsworth. Don't ask me why. It just is.
Many of the historical facts captured my interest, an earthquake I lived through, a fire. The passage on the L.A. freeways, the ones I learned to drive on in drivers training . . . classic. I smiled with fond memories at the network of arteries that are the pulse of L.A. You need them, you curse them, they are the only way to get from Point A to Point B. When I moved to Idaho, I'd ask, "How long does it take to get there on the freeway?" The answer would be, "It's five miles." I'd shake my head, "No, you don't get it--how long? Like an hour, or what?" I was gazed at as if I were dense. In L.A., it might take you an hour to travel one mile on the Santa Monica in rush hour.
BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, while meandering in its characters, the majority we never see again, does follow a loose structure of four main players. There's Dylan and Maddie, nineteen, running to L.A. in the hopes of finding their dream life. I was touched the most by these characters, and hoping they would succeed in a city that can make or break you. I felt for them, I knew where they were in the Valley, and I'd pushed my daughter in a baby carriage through the Westside Pavilion, the area where Maddie found her "dream" apartment. Then there's Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl, whose dream it was for her parents to give her a better life. Her story follows her growing up in East L.A., the struggles of the family, the vow her father makes to protect her. And Amberton Parker, the movie actor who is gorgeous, married, has kids, but leads a secret life. His story is pathetically narcissistic, and most likely, all too true. Old Man Joe, homeless, lives in the bathroom at Venice Beach. He's drawn so vividly, I think I know him. Seen him there many times when riding my bike on the boardwalk.
While this novel may not hold the same appeal to someone who didn't call Los Angeles home, it's worth reading for the cast of characters, people we know, don't want to know, wish we knew. It's a daily struggle of life, trying to blend, mesh, meld, tolerate, love . . . hate. BRIGHT SHINY MORNING was a journey home for me, almost a maudlin reflection of where I'd been for the first thirty-three years of my life. There were times I read and I grew homesick. Other times, I thanked God I don't live in that smog-pit anymore. Whatever the case, the novel captured my attention, and dare I admit it, made me a fan of Frey.
Book Review: Not for the squeamish!
Summary: 5 Stars
The frontispiece of James Frey's latest book, "Bright Shiny Morning" carries the disclaimer: "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable". Perhaps the author has learnt a lesson from the furore caused when his earlier book, "A Million Little Pieces", was exposed as partly fictional? (Sorry--embellished!) Perhaps he wishes to avoid being sued by those he defames in one or other of the various disparaging "facts" he presents in this book? Or perhaps he's merely messing with the heads of his readers by giving us his version of the "everything I say is a lie" paradox right at the outset? For this is a book that most decidedly does mess with the heads of its readers, big time.
Ostensibly, the book is a presentation of the separate stories of many people, all unconnected in any way other than through the single fact of them living (if it can be called that) somewhere within the vastness of modern-day Los Angeles. Sometimes we are offered no more than a glimpse of these individuals--not even learning so much as their names--as some particular circumstance of their lives (or their deaths--for there are many of those--or their ruin--many of those too) is paraded before us. Each may appear across just a few pages; over only a paragraph or two; or even--and quite commonly--within nothing more than a single cryptic sentence. Over the 500 pages of this novel, we encounter vast numbers of these souls, each appearing like moths out of the darkness of the text, allowing us to glimpse briefly some small aspect of their shape, colour or form, before they are consumed, taken by the flame that draws them all; gone to their destiny or their doom (usually both the same thing). Some, only a carefully selected handful, we learn about in more detail and we are permitted to follow their particular stories in more depth, across the book as a whole, never sure whether they are also spiralling to their own inevitable destinies, or whether they might just escape in the end.
The real protagonist of "Bright Shiny Morning" is not, however, to be found amongst the human lives that flit across the pages, hypnotised by the light. Rather it is the very light itself--the heaving throbbing soulless uncaring monster always a monster the monster light never gentle never kind just brutal brutal brutal that is Los Angeles, Los Angeles yeah--whose pounding pulse and irresistible pull is used to bind the reader to the book from opening to close. For the city is clearly the hero (or anti-hero) here, almost drawing a life of its own from the human lives it consumes with indifference day after day. And which is here lovingly and detestingly exposed down to every last dirty sordid intimate detail. The book is brutal--gut-wrenchingly, heart-rendingly so. But its racing roaring vibrant writing and commas who the f--- needs commas racing oh I said racing already fast-paced text does such a good job of interlacing the brutal but entirely believable fiction with equally brutal yet bizarre and barely believable fact--and at such a whirlwind pace--that you soon stop knowing what to believe and what to accept simply as story. Or indeed, what to laugh about and what to cry about. All you know is that you have to keep reading keep reading turning the pages over and over and over mustn't put it down...
So. Buy it. Read it. Hate it. Love it. Cry when it's gone want more be thankful it's done. But buy it.
Book Review: My Hope
Summary: 5 Stars
I was the first to get the book from my local Barnes and Nobles and I know this because they told me this--I read a lot. I read Austen and Bronte. I read Hemingway and Faulkner. I read Mailer and Vidal. I read I read I read. You'll have to trust me when I say that I consider myself a literate person, a published writer, and a harsh and unbearable critic--of self and others--and I haven't read all of Bright Shiny Morning yet. I have read four hundred and ten pages of it. With the negative reviews that are to follow, I figured a partial review on my favorite place to buy books online would be appropriate to thin out what will surely be many an unjust review. Let's put aside that he's an embellisher in his memoirs (I could care less). Let's focus solely on the novel at hand. Let's start with the negatives.
Two Teens runaway from home to start a life together. (Cliche)
A blockbuster actor married to a beautiful woman is really gay. (Cliche)
A spanish nanny with a deformity who starts a relationships with the son of a client. (Cliche)
A homeless man who befriends a runaway. (Most assuredly cliche)
The writing is shoddily punctuated, annoyingly incomplete, and choppy. (You look and have to make sure you read it right).
The language is rough. (Constant swearing, difficult to read material)
The vignette excursions are sometimes annoying, sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, sometimes a miss, and sometimes a hit. (Some worked in the book, other's probably could've been left out).
Now I'll tell you why none of these negatives matter.
The cliche story lines could kill a book if not so beautifully put together that you become engrossed in the characters--the characters become the originals in a story that's been told a thousand times.
The writing is all his own. It's reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It flares with an immediacy not seen in books anymore--or rarely seen in books anymore. The excursions from the story are necessary because without them, you don't get the major character, which is, LA. LA rings as the focal character, a land and place all its own that rings true to the world around us, the focal point for the American dream, the focal point for hope and decadance, the focal point for stardom and fame, the focal point for what drives American's home lives to the television each day, the focal point for these characters existence, the focal point for life in a sense.
I ask, and I hope, my only hope, that you who are angry at James Frey, let it go, and don't try and crush the book simply because you feel lied to. A believable lie, after all, is what good fiction is made out of, for if he could suspend disbelief well enough for us to believe everything in his memoir's (that he didn't even want to call memoirs, mind you, it's labeled, Memoir/Literature), he certainly suspends disbelief in bringing to life the characters. You will feel their pain and their defeats, their victories and their happines, at least to where I've read to. I don't know about the rest of the book... but he's never been one for the crapped out ending, so I'm quite sure. Buy it, you'll love it. If you don't buy it and you don't read it, then just don't write a review, for a review is not how you feel about the author, it's how you feel about the work he put out into the world, so be mature, grow up, and read a good book from a unique and new voice in the world of literature.
Book Review: copping a lesser heart
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm an old broke-down bricklayer, former roughneck, roustabout, coal miner, ranchhand, short-order cook, so on, thirty-two years of sweat, dirt, whiskey, cigarettes, dope, women, dopey women, arrests six, seven, eight, I don't know, nothing serious, not very, brawls, here and there, in a dozen states, none in the last ten years, nine years. A few years ago, when he was getting big, just before the lovely fall, I picked up in the Cutchogue Free Library "A Million Little Pieces" and on the first page knew the dude was a fraud whether this was fiction or fact because no one, not even in Bruce Willis movie, is allowed on a plane in the condition he described. Even before 9-11 I was barred from getting on a plane merely because of a newly fat lip, whiskey aftershave and a little pleasant wobble to my step. That said, there was something hypnotic about his prose, irritatingly hypnotic, but hypnotic nonetheless even with every page fighting the urge to fling the book across the Cutchogue Free Library's reading room because a million little peeps were reading the same book and raving and I was reading it and losing my mind: Who believes this crock of bologna written without a whit of wit intelligence soul but hypnotic? I mean I like "Rocky IV," Bert Hirschfield ("Cindy on Fire"), Sidney Sheldon, Ernest Hemmingway, Fyodor Dostoevskii, William Davies ("Autobiography of a Super Tramp"), Lafcadio Hearn, the movies "Armageddon," "Independence Day," Sailor Ron," "Major League," "Petrified Forest," "Dark Victory," "It's Love I'm After," and "All About Eve," to say nothing of Eugene O'Neil, Isaac Babel, Joan Armatrading, The Bulgarian Woman's Choir, Art Tatum, the Village People, Cool and the Gang, The New Orleans Jazz Vipers and Johnny Paycheck. I like a lotta different stuff for a lotta different reasons, none learned, but I hated "A Million Little Pieces" and saw in it almost everything wrong with American Literature and Life and not in a good way, but hypnotic and I danced nineteen jigs when The Smoking Gun busted the creepy sap-at-heart who had the temeritrocity to claim Kerouac and Miller as antecedents, though I am, actually, descended from Noah, apparently.
Fortunately, "Bright Shiny Morning" is not hypnotic. It is, let me be plain, pure garbage, page one to page you-can't-endure-no-more. Garbage garbage garbage. If you like this book, you are an idiot, and this is from a man who has watched "Armageddon" nine times and knows almost every line by loving heart. (A little bit of me is in every misfit portrayed, and we ne-er-do-anythings know in our hearts we could save the world, so long as we don't have to be part of it, unless our debts are forgiven and outstanding warrants forgotten...) I also can recite long passages from Thomas Otway, Oliver Goldsmith, W. B. Yeats, Helen Hunt H. J. K. "Husband Hopper" Jackson by heart.
James Frey is a fraud, as is most of America, most of whom and which are the moral equivalent of the wife of a gangster. He traffics in clichés of perception and has nothing in his being but the desire to be something other than what he is, which explains his popularity.
I'm tired. Frey deserves not even this.
Book Review: Haven't read something that moved me this much in a long time...
Summary: 5 Stars
I just read the last few pages (almost 500) of James Frey's newest book, 'Bright Shiny Morning', and I can't figure out what to say, or if words are even enough.
Never has a book, since 'The Perks of Being A Wallflower', have I been so incredibly moved by a novel. It's novels like these that tear your heart in half and sew it back together.
This novel has broken me in half. Reading it, I went through the most happiest of times, to the deepest sadness, to actually being afraid, to feeling sick, to feeling every possible feeling. I carried this book with me to work and I work at Wal-Mart, and I always take my breaks at the McDonalds there, and there people would stare at me because I would be reading and making these facial expressions, sad, happy, sometimes I would read something so funny (Especially when you meet the guy named 'Lemonade'... hahaha...) that I would start burst out laughing.
It looks huge, but the lines are double spaced and the pages just fly. Sometimes though, I was so afraid to find out what was going to happen (because reading Frey's novels, you quickly learn to understand you can never know what to expect...) that I would actually find myself re-reading the same stupid sentence over and over cuz I was so afraid! Lmao! I'm dead serious.
Also, the way Frey writes is beautiful. It's the worst writing ever, lol, he writes like a photographer would, in a wierd way, he takes snap shots of thoughts and prints them, not caring if they look funny without commas or periods or bunched up, and it takes a while to get used to it, unless you read his other books.
There's one part where I found myself reading ten pages of the most boring thing in the world, about highways, but the chapter after that was so incredibly amazing and it all connected with the previous ten pages arggggh I wish I could just read it to you.
This book follows four main narritives, it has the story of a bum who wants to help a poor drug addicted girl, a spanish girl who hates herself, a gay celebrity that hides this fact from the world, and best of all, Dylan and Maddie, a teenage couple who ran away from a bunch of horror to be in love with each other, who I now am incredibly in love with.
I don't know if you read his first novel 'A Million Little Pieces', but forget about all the bad publicity. He wrote a memoir and threw a bunch of crap in it to make it have a better moral, a moral of hope, and he had no idea that he was going to be famous, he didn't want a huge scandal. (I, as an artist, understand this.) Even if you think what he did was unfair, forgive him, and please please read this novel. Lol you will thank me for suggesting it, I swear it. I read, typically, about 2-3 novels every month, and this is the first novel in a long time (three years) that actually made me cry at the end, in a happy way, in a sad way, in a wonderful way.
Oh, and I'm moving to L.A. now. Lol. Who's with me? Thanks James for infecting me with your L.A. dream thing lol.
I give 'Bright Shiny Morning' a 6 out of 5 stars. :)