Word: novelization
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Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down...
...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...
Bright Shiny Morning is a refreshingly archaic affair, an old-fashioned book written in an old-fashioned style. It's less a novel about Los Angeles than it is Los Angeles--in-novel-form, an attempt to embrace and describe and sum up the city by mixing fictional story lines about diverse characters--rich, poor, homeless; black, white, Mexican--with actual facts (somebody might 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...
...Compare Bright Shiny Morning with, say, Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, a novel of similar proportions and ambitions (it's about Las Vegas) that was published in January to 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...
...long as my kids are afraid of me, that's all I really care about," she says. She has two with her husband, a journalist.) Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It was followed in 2003 by a novel, The Namesake, which was made into a movie by Mira Nair, and this year by another collection, Unaccustomed Earth, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, an astounding feat for a book of quiet, formal short stories about the lives of Bengali immigrants and their children...