Bright Shiny Morning
James Frey
HarperCollins 2008
I picked this book out of the discount bin at Chapters. At first I thought it was easy to see why, the stories jumped around in a million different directions with seemingly innocuous facts about the city of Los Angles thrown in as filler.I found my self frustrated with Frey's habit of introducing a new character or story arch only to have it disappear a mere 2 paragraphs later with no sign of returning. Something pushed me onward, made me keep turning the pages until the books saving grace dawned me; the seemingly random characters were not the character the reader was meant to focus on. The city itself was the subject of the novel and the hodgepodge of stories, from the homeless men on Venice Beach, the wealthy closeted actors, the american mexican maid, or the newly wedded teenagers from out of state were all just plot progressers for Los Angles. A character study not of a person but of a city. Once you can accept that your focus should not be on the people in the city the book just flows. However, I find Frey's writing style (when not confined to random facts or lists most likely taken from source books close to verbatim)to be a bit awkward. To much repetition and awkward diction detracts from otherwise suspensefull and emotional scenes and leads to a very cliche filled novel. Somehow, dispite it all , it worked for me. Maybe I too have a cliched vision of the city of Los Angles.
***bloggers note***
At the first reading of this novel I was painfully oblivious to the fact that the author of this was also the infamous James Frey of the Million Little Pieces memoir controversy so this in no way had any influence on the review nor my initial interest in the novel.
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