Books

How good is James Frey's novel Bright Shiny Morning (Harper, $26.95)? Depends on whom you ask. Here are excerpts from two heavyweight reviewers on opposite coasts:

The New York Times

He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.

He waited. They forgot about him. He tried again.

The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart. And it worked.

That's how James Frey saved himself.

Los Angeles Times

Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah. Two and a half years after he was eviscerated by Oprah Winfrey for exaggerating many of the incidents in his now-discredited memoir A Million Little Pieces, he's back with this book, which aims to be the big novel about Los Angeles, a panoramic look at the city that seeks to tell us who we are and how we live.

Ultimately, though, it is still what's on the page that matters, and Bright Shiny Morning is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining.

Written as an Altman-esque collage, it follows several parallel story lines that never coalesce. As a connective device, Mr. Frey interweaves a series of short passages outlining the history of LA, beginning with the founding of the Pueblo and extending to the present day. Yet this strategy ends up as a metaphor for all that's wrong with the book. These bits read like encyclopedia entries, devoid of soul or personality, so generic as to be inconsequential, as if Mr. Frey has no interest or engagement in what he has chosen to write about.

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