No credibility
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Unfortunately for me Frey no longer has any credibility, style or authenticity. This book could have been written by anyone who has watched too many TV documentaries.
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Disappointing
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Having loved A Million Little Pieces, I approached this book with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately it did not entertain me in the same way.
So many different characters were introduced, a short chapter each, and then they disappeared in favour of yet more characters. Occasionally we returned to a familiar name and went further with them but I found myself wondering with each page turn whether it would be yet again someone new.
When I hit a lenghty section on the history and geography of the Los Angeles road network I finally gave up.
The informative brief clips on the development of the state of LA from early times were mildly interesting but to a greater extent were interruptions to the flow(?) of the narrative.
I hate to be beaten by a book and I may return and give it another try in a few months, but for now I fear it's only 3 stars.
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City Of Blinding Lights
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From what I've read elsewhere James Frey has already cut an infamous figure in literary circles with his debut book 'A Million Little Pieces'. Purported - at first - to be a personal memoir of his past, it was later exposed by the media as pure fiction instead. Cue huge public outrage and a public dressing down & humiliation on the Oprah Winfrey show. To be honest, I'd not heard a single word about all of this before I began this novel and I'm glad I didn't: 'Bright Shiny Morning' is absolutely brilliant regardless of any reputation Frey has.
This novel isn't easy to describe. There are 4 main plots and these are mixed in with either brief snapshots of other minor denizens of LA or various bits of trivia about the city today (for example a list of the innumerate murderous gangs that roam its streets). Every break in the book is punctuated with events in the history of the city in the form of a single paragraph on a single page. Like the city itself, the novel is a sprawling mix of these strands but it never complicates itself by twisting them all together. The brief snippets of history and one off stories here & there allow the 4 main plots to breathe independently.
I thoroughly enjoyed this innovative book from cover to cover. Aside from the book's wonderful structure, the 4 main stories reflect the best known aspects of LA (& America today) very well: the rich & famous, the down & out, the migrant worker and kids in search of the American Dream. I often did wonder amidst the bulk of the novel if some of the shorter ones would be expanded later on or somehow clash with the bigger stories but, on reflection now, I'm glad they didn't. Such is the vastness of LA's varied populace, perhaps leaving out other individual voices meant some parts had to stand alone (beguilingly) in the way they did. The novel is really is a such a huge, delicious yet terrifying mix of ideas and one started to sense that the lead character wasn't someone from the 4 main stories, but Los Angeles itself.
This is my novel of the year so far. By a country mile. A modern masterpiece.
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Unreadable rubbish
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This book was so badly written, I couldn't even get past the character introductions.
I have happily read books by Burroughs, Henry Miller and Dostoevsky, so I'm not lacking in the intelligence to read 'difficult' books. You must have to drink the Kool-aid to believe this is a good book, when it's simply hard to read due to the author's lack of writing ability.
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Fiction is stranger than Truth
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I don't know about you but anyone who sends Oprah Winfrey into a fury of righteous indignation is alright by me. Whether Frey's debut, A Million Little Pieces had fictional elements or not mattered not to me: it was massively entertaining and it's monotone, grammar-less prose was blistering.
Frey has applied the same formula to fiction and sadly, it doesn't really work. He has admitted that once he writes his first draft, he never re-writes it or even re-reads it. While this style worked for the claustrophobic, catatonic environment of the addiction treatment facility of A Million Little Pieces, it doesn't serve the focus of his new, sprawling novel, which is all about LA.
The endless tidbits of factual information about his favourite city seem an afterthought, and I found myself scrolling through them with an 1000-yard glare. His characters and their scenarious are so cliche and obvious that after 30 pages we could easily predict their inevitable demise.
Frey has had an interesting life but he doesn't seem to be able to describe anyone but himself.
Nevertheless, this book is a page turner and despite the ill-advised '500 facts about LA' chapters, will keep you busy on the beach.
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