Jason Rice: Bright Shiny Morning is the debut novel by writer James Frey. It’s been a long while since we’ve seen anything from Mr. Frey and I was worried that there wouldn’t be much to read after the events that followed his memoir being selected by Ms. Winfrey. What’s the most exciting thing about Bright Shiny Morning? It’s a book that defies description and all at once is something profoundly original. Recently Mr. Frey was talking about first thought being best thought, and how several writers that he admired used that theory to describe how they wrote. For me I wondered for a long time if Frey would be able to carry over the wildly urgent and blistering narrative style that made A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard such exciting books to read.
Once the ideas takes hold in Bright Shiny Morning, you realize that this book is basically the mother of all L.A. novels and would make Thompson, Chandler more recently Connolly blush. You’re in for a vanity free ride into the heart a multiple story lines and four distinct plot strands that make the book impossible to put down. All at once Frey launches into a story filled with ideas and lost hope, distant morality and morbid realizations that life is brutally honest and the cup is usually half empty. We met Maddie and Dylan who want to start a life in L.A. they arrive by pickup truck and find there way through the darkest side of human existence. In Joe, a bum and alcoholic, Frey delivers the most openly repulsive side of L.A. and the devil does truly reside in the details. Amberton, a stereotypical movie stud whose secret side as a homosexual brings his life down hard, and offers a side to showbiz that is truly gut wrenching and difficult to watch. Finally the gem of the book is Ezmerelda who becomes an American citizen the day she is born and dropped on the desert floor just over the border.
All of this may seem like surface paint, and nothing more than a façade but it’s not. I’m interested to hear what you both thought about the structure of this book, not only from these four/five lives we follow for five hundred pages but the riveting historical facts that Frey weaves into the tapestry of this fine novel. I was stunned by the little thumbnail sketches that really amounted to nothing more than Frey showcasing his talents and made up for the wanderings that other writers tend to do within a character. With these people who come and go he manages to fill out his primary characters with throw away people as background which really only take up a few pages every so often.
Dennis Haritou: Jaces, I think that the best way to approach this novel is to consider it experimental and then ask what the experiment is. I hope me saying that doesn’t throw readers off. What I mean to do by that statement is, quite the contrary, throw readers in to the cosmos that is James Frey’s Los Angeles. This book makes James Frey the 21st century L.A.’s Balzac, at least within the city limits of this novel just as Balzac makes 19th century Paris more than just a soundstage but an unforgettable character in the human comedy. In my opinion this is really a novel with multiple story lines that read like screenplays. The four plot lines skim over the surface of these characters lives but as a kind of compensation for the lack of interiority, that surface is vast…as vast as L.A., for the structure of the novel models the structure of the city. This novel is a city. In answer to JR’s question about structure: it makes me think of Mondrian.
Note how the patterns seem to exceed the edge of the canvas. There is the implication that the patterns go on further than you can see. How far? We can’t tell: perhaps they go on forever. This feeling of extended meaning is what I am getting from Frey’s novel. I want to offer some criticism in my second post and get back to JR’s reference to those fact-like substances, but right now, I want only to praise.
Jason Chambers: Bright Shiny Morning is a broad work, an especially unusual novel. In this dark and sadly comic book, Frey shows some pretty dazzling prose skill. I especially liked the raw hopefulness of Maddie and Dylan (shattered, naturally) and the matter-of-fact corruption and utter narcissism of Amberton in their respective sections.
To me, there are several competing elements here. First are the several aforementioned major plot lines, which viewed separately are really compelling short stories, or even small novellas. Then, we have the seemingly countless short set pieces, most of which are a tiny revelation to the reader. Thirdly, the L.A. historical timeline and occasionally interspersed fun and not so fun facts.
On one hand, so many of the individual sketches are just such damned good writing that the book is difficult to set aside. However, does the structure and unfinished nature of the book as a whole detract from the strength of the individual stories, or is the structure itself the last and most intriguing element? Perhaps the stories continue off the page, as Dennis suggests, and the snapshot is the best approximation we can make to the whole. Four square blocks to represent a city. A small sample to represent the greater population.
The major stories stand on their own, and so, largely, do the smaller ones. To respond to you, JR, the historical references and the fun facts are, of course, the threads that mean to link these stories and give them a common L.A.-ness and an expansiveness that extends beyond the frame of each tale alone – Dennis’s Mondrian lines, if you will. Taken separately, these elements are the weakest of the book, as well as the place where Frey’s voice changes from observer to cynic and occasional jokester. The question is, is the whole greater than the sum of its respective excellent parts? I’m not convinced that it is, but I’m still thinking about it.
JR: The fact that we’re still thinking about it really makes my point, especially since this writing is basically author free, and essentially the truest form of American Realism that I’ve seen in a long time. This is much more developed than Richard Ford or Carver; it even gives people like Tobias Wolff and Chekhov a run for the money. Those authors offer their fears, hopes and dreams for their characters, but not Frey. Its closest comparison is Cormac McCarthy’s latest work, the god like narrator that shows you the world as it really is. McCarthy is showing you that there is true evil in the world, especially with The Road, more hints in No Country For Old Men. Frey is showing the reader that he can envelope himself behind his characters and make it seem like he isn’t speaking, which is a masterful trick. The only time he does is when he makes comments about how funny, or not funny certain facts about L.A. are or aren’t. Other than that, he’s invisible. You believe these people, the mundane worries, fat thighs, or a suit that doesn’t fit right and a man who doesn’t love you like you do him, or getting your favorite dinner after a long day at the golf course, these people have foibles and obsessions mixed in with petty frustrations that plague us all. The only time this stuff wears on the reader is when it becomes boring, or their lives are just too much to handle, and that’s similar to a non-literary life, or real life, where we hear things from people, about their lives, or what ever and we finally say, “will you please shut up, I can’t deal with your drama anymore.” But it’s Frey who turns the hose on us so to speak, without ever offering a moment to come up for air. And you guys are right; these lives are still going on.
The structure you’re talking about is simply an armature to hang these people on, to properly display them. The writing in the sections that are non-story, meaning the background, where we just meet people, are so carefree and fluid that it makes the rest of the book seem dense and profoundly insightful with out ever hearing an explanation, as Frey lays it on the line for the main characters repeatedly but without ever showing his hand. We don’t get insights about the characters that reveal more than their actions, or what they say. There is no Updikean flight of fancy about what the L.A. suburbs are really like, we don’t hear from Frey through these people, which is refreshing as he shows it and says it, which is a hard thing to do in contemporary fiction. At the same time this stuff flies, really moves, like I’ve never seen, and it’s brutally honest and maintains a level of relentless intensity that isn’t often seen in fiction these days. I guess I don’t see a reflection from the characters, just action, doing and talking, no philosophizing or time to think.
DH: Jason’s, we are mostly on the same page with Bright Shiny Morning which is something that surprises and impresses me about the book. JR is talking about a new realism. This may be realism but it is not a 19th century, naturalist realism. This is not Balzac or (better) Zola realism, it is Frey realism. Its filmic which means, in part I guess, that the fantasy is subsumed into the surface play of people’s lives. What better epicenter for that to happen in than L.A.? Like all great writers, Frey has chosen his setting well. We have had about a century of filmmaking. Don’t you think all that storytelling is going to impact what our sense of realism is going to be? Maybe we end up with something that a 19th century reader would not recognize as realism.
This may have some odd sideshow carnival effects on our vision. These characters seem “flat” to me, like cartoons or better, like a fresco. They have no moral nuance either. They either wear white hats like Esmeralda or black hats like her acidic employer from Pasadena. But that’s not a criticism! It’s an effect of: “the surface is all there is but now let’s really pay attention to what that surface is.” This novel is not trite as a result; it’s visionary. But I share JC’s puzzlement over whether this entirely works or not. I am not a fan of much that is in the more “documentary” sections of the novel like the “fun facts” and would have preferred to read the book without them but I believe that I understand why those sections are there…part of the surface display of how this fiction works. But I don’t want to quibble. This is major art.
JC: Frankly, I’m at a loss, since I largely agree with the two of you – unfamiliar territory. Frey is a modern realist; there is no romanticism, here, no expectation of a triumph over adversity, no attempt to explain or redefine what happens. Frey, as JR notes, just shows what happens without commentary. These people are what they do and say, without either benefit or hindrance of interior reflection from the narration. I don’t necessary see them as flat, but perhaps as ambiguous, because without knowing their thoughts all we can interpret are their actions: Is Kevin’s lawsuit the result of the shame of the sexual harassment, or is it calculated? Amberton is both manipulative and heartbroken at once. Is it ok for Dylan to steal from a murderer and drug-dealer as long as he doesn’t get caught? I think I know the answers, but I know that Frey won’t tell me. When the character acts next, he will reveal himself.
I’m still divided about the structural usage of historical episodes and facts, along with mini-stories to build the scaffolding for the larger tales. Without those elements, the stories themselves would have been seamless, but instead he has populated around them, navigating the shallow edges and creating something completely different, a kind of exhilarating if ragged experiment. Might the book be better without them? Perhaps – but it would be a hell of a lot less interesting.
JR: By far one of our most interesting and compelling conversations, and from an author that seemed to hold our attention almost unanimously. James Frey certainly is an exciting and vital voice in American literature. I’m glad we could all see this from more or less the same point of view. Bright Shiny Morning’s mix of contemporary society and the seamy side of life is a powerful potion only to be out done by Frey’s incredible flair with narrative style.
Recent Comments