It’s Fiction—For Real

Give James Frey some credit. If you had been humiliated by Oprah Winfrey on television in front of who-knows-how-many-million viewers, you might still be hiding under the bed. If your name became cultural shorthand for "man who invents lots of details in his memoir," you might change that name and permanently move to another country, preferably one that didn't carry "Oprah." But the author of "A Million Little Pieces"—the questionable memoir in question—is made of sterner stuff. In the wake of that public shaming two years ago, he picked himself up, got another agent, landed a new book contract and completed a novel, "Bright Shiny Morning," which is being published this month.

That's the good news—good, as in nobody likes a quitter. The bad news is the novel's no good. Frey's first two books, including "My Friend Leonard," strained credulity on almost every page—the dental surgery without painkillers, the lovable gangster in rehab who adopts the author. Such incidents, you kept thinking, must be true, precisely because they seemed so unbelievable. But when you put that same writer's talents to work in a novel without the crutch of purported truth, things wobble between threadbare and preposterous.

"Bright Shiny Morning" is a sprawling (501 pages) novel about Los Angeles. It contains not just one plot but several, each racing along in its own lane, each featuring a different socioeconomic swatch—movie stars, immigrants, bums—a real equal-opportunity cast. The multiple stories alternate with small chapters recounting the city's history, beginning with its days as a Spanish mission. Frey wants to capture the soul of this disparate city without a center on paper, and the only way he knows how to do that is to gather as many elements as he can find and shovel them all into the novel. His thesis seems to be that Los Angeles is not one story but many, and that we understand the place only by seeing how it survives without cohering. Stop me if you've heard this.

In the opening pages, we're stampeded by a crowd of people, some of whom we'll keep company with for the duration, others who are only drive-by acquaintances, never to be seen again. We meet a runaway teenage couple from Ohio. We meet a man who through luck and pluck starts a mini-golf empire. We meet a wino with a particular fondness for Chablis. We meet a family of Mexican illegals whose daughter is born as soon as they cross the border. And we meet a movie star, Amberton Parker. When Amberton appears, the breathless prose starts to pant in earnest:

"Amberton Parker.

"Born in Chicago, the scion of a great midwestern meatpacking family.