Word: frey
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...empt them. Carr, an ex--crack addict turned media columnist for the New York Times, faces two problems in writing his story: he was so often high during the period in question that he's fuzzy on the facts, and he's writing in the post--James Frey era, when being fuzzy on the facts can land you in the hot seat on Oprah...
...approached Frey's new book, a novel called Bright Shiny Morning (Harper; 512 pages) with something approximating a neutral frame of mind. As it turns out, if you're thinking of not buying it because of Frey's past misdeeds, you might want to look for some other way of getting back at him, because it's a pretty good read...
...want to check them) about L.A.'s freeways and crime rates and history and such. It's reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe's billion-footed beasts, but it's even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Fittingly, Frey uses a hard-boiled, under-punctuated, Hemingway type of nonstyle that seems to growl, I'm giving you the straight dope here, son. (A sample: "They lived in a small town in an eastern state it was nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full of alcohol, abuse and religion...
These stories have two things in common. One, they take place in L.A. Two, they are all clichés. Frey has less fear of cliché, or of sentimentality, or of stating the obvious, than almost any other writer I have ever read. He literally writes as if he personally discovered that show-biz people are fake, homeless people can have hearts of gold, love can bridge any divide, and people go to L.A. to watch their dreams...
...great critical acclaim. Children drips with nuance and high purpose and psychological complexity, but in all honesty, I would far rather spend an evening (or a morning) with Morning than with Children. The worst bits of Morning are probably worse than anything else you'll read this year, but Frey is such a relentlessly entertaining storyteller that you just won't care. Sure, the setups are formulaic (ironically, Frey makes fun of Hollywood's cookie-cutter plots, while his aren't much better), but the details are pure over-the-top pulp, and they go by so fast...