Bright Shiny Morning [Paperback]

James Frey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2009

Welcome to LA. City of contradictions. It is home to movie stars and down-and-outs. Palm-lined beaches and gridlock. Shopping sprees and gun sprees. Bright Shiny Morning takes a wild ride through the ultimate metropolis, where glittering excess rubs shoulders with seedy depravity. Frey's trademark filmic snapshots zoom in on the parallel lives of diverse characters, bringing their egos and ideals, hopes and despairs, anxieties and absurdities vividly to life. Some suffer, like the otherworldly wino who tries to save a spoilt teenage runaway. Others gain, like the canny talent agent who turns sexual harassment to blackmailing advantage. Some are loaded, or grounded, and have luck on their side. Others, like the countless actresses-turned-hookers, or schoolboys-turned-gangsters, are doomed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Sara NelsonWhen James Frey imploded as a memoirist in 2006, many said his A Million Little Pieces should have been—and perhaps initially was—presented as a novel, and that Frey—a sometimes screenwriter—was, both by nature and design, a fiction writer. Bright Shiny Morning is his first official book of fiction. If it's not quite a novel, less believable in its way than his augmented memoir ever was, there's no doubt it's a work of Frey's imagination. Ironic, isn't it?Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Bright Shiny Morning is not a cohesive narrative but a compilation of vignettes of several characters (if this were a memoir, we'd call them composites) who have come to the city to fulfill their dreams. Some examples: Dylan and Maddie, madly-in-love Midwestern runaways who survive through the kindness of near strangers; Esperanza, a Mexican-American maid tortured by a body that could have been drawn by R. Crumb; a group of drunks and junkies who create a community behind the shacks on Venice Beach; Amberton Parker, a hugely famous married movie star who is secretly—you guessed it—gay. Interspersed with these rotating portraits are random historical and statistical factoids (which better have been fact-checked, even if there is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink disclaimer up front: Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable) about L.A.: that, for example, approximately 2.7 million people live without health insurance and there are more than 12,000 people who describe their job as bill collector in the City of Los Angeles. Frey's intention, it seems, is to create an onomatopoetic jumble, a cacophony of facts and fiction, stats and stories, that replicate the contradictory nature of the place they describe. I expect, given the sharpness of the knives that some critics have out for Frey, that many will say the book flat out doesn't work. First off, there's that voice, the hyperbolic, breathless, run-on, word-repeating voice that was much better suited to a memoir (or even a novel) in which the hero was a hyperbolic, breathless alcoholic and drug addict. And then there's the frat-boy swagger that angered some readers of AMLP turning up here, too, so faux-cynical as to be naïve: the gang father's attaboy about his five-year-old son's desire to be a cold-blooded killer, and the prurient, adolescent take on sex. (And couldn't someone have stopped him from exclaiming woohoo after some of his fun and not fun factoids?) Yet the guy has something: an energy, a drive, a relentlessness, maybe, that can pull readers along, past the voice, past the stock characters, past the clichés. Bright Shiny Morning is a train wreck of a novel, but it's un-put-downable, a real page-turner—in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition. Sara Nelson is the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Two years after Frey’s memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was outed as part fiction, the publicly chastised writer resurfaces with a novel much of which purports to be fact. Set in a Los Angeles populated by miniature-golf moguls, ex-beauty queens, gun-shop owners, debauched child actors, meth dealers, and yoginis in thongs, this gargantuan book is seeded, Melville-like, with chapters cataloguing the city’s snarled highways and quirky innovations (e.g., the world’s first video graveyard). The characters are relentlessly stock: two lovesick kids from the heartland ("nowhere anywhere everywhere"); a bulimic, closeted movie star with a "MEGAWATT!!!!!" smile; a Mexican-American maid with an abusive employer. Frey strives for incantatory but winds up with banal; when it comes to emotion, the best he can muster is "It’s deep, it’s true, and it’s real real real."
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Hodder Pb (January 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1848540477
• ISBN-13: 978-1848540477
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (192 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,639,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Frey is originally from Cleveland. He is the author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

373 of 413 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Hope, May 13, 2008

By 

C. Oliver (Worcester, MASSACHUSETTS United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bright Shiny Morning (Hardcover)

I was the first to get the book from my local Barnes and Nobles and I know this because they told me this--I read a lot. I read Austen and Bronte. I read Hemingway and Faulkner. I read Mailer and Vidal. I read I read I read. You'll have to trust me when I say that I consider myself a literate person, a published writer, and a harsh and unbearable critic--of self and others--and I haven't read all of Bright Shiny Morning yet. I have read four hundred and ten pages of it. With the negative reviews that are to follow, I figured a partial review on my favorite place to buy books online would be appropriate to thin out what will surely be many an unjust review. Let's put aside that he's an embellisher in his memoirs (I could care less). Let's focus solely on the novel at hand. Let's start with the negatives.

Two Teens runaway from home to start a life together. (Cliche)

A blockbuster actor married to a beautiful woman is really gay. (Cliche)

A spanish nanny with a deformity who starts a relationships with the son of a client. (Cliche)

A homeless man who befriends a runaway. (Most assuredly cliche)

The writing is shoddily punctuated, annoyingly incomplete, and choppy. (You look and have to make sure you read it right).

The language is rough. (Constant swearing, difficult to read material)

The vignette excursions are sometimes annoying, sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, sometimes a miss, and sometimes a hit. (Some worked in the book, other's probably could've been left out).

Now I'll tell you why none of these negatives matter.

The cliche story lines could kill a book if not so beautifully put together that you become engrossed in the characters--the characters become the originals in a story that's been told a thousand times.

The writing is all his own. It's reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It flares with an immediacy not seen in books anymore--or rarely seen in books anymore. The excursions from the story are necessary because without them, you don't get the major character, which is, LA. LA rings as the focal character, a land and place all its own that rings true to the world around us, the focal point for the American dream, the focal point for hope and decadance, the focal point for stardom and fame, the focal point for what drives American's home lives to the television each day, the focal point for these characters existence, the focal point for life in a sense.

I ask, and I hope, my only hope, that you who are angry at James Frey, let it go, and don't try and crush the book simply because you feel lied to. A believable lie, after all, is what good fiction is made out of, for if he could suspend disbelief well enough for us to believe everything in his memoir's (that he didn't even want to call memoirs, mind you, it's labeled, Memoir/Literature), he certainly suspends disbelief in bringing to life the characters. You will feel their pain and their defeats, their victories and their happines, at least to where I've read to. I don't know about the rest of the book... but he's never been one for the crapped out ending, so I'm quite sure. Buy it, you'll love it. If you don't buy it and you don't read it, then just don't write a review, for a review is not how you feel about the author, it's how you feel about the work he put out into the world, so be mature, grow up, and read a good book from a unique and new voice in the world of literature.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Redeemer!, May 9, 2009

By 

Mary W. Black "Lover of words" (Flagstaff, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bright Shiny Morning (Paperback)

This book was bought primarily because I felt bad about the crucifiction he faced with dignity on Oprah and I wanted to be supportive. I had not read any of his other works and was amazed at the raw soaring talent displayed within this book. I was enthralled from the first word to the last. Frey is an amazing writer and I will now buy everything he writes with eager anticipation..much like Poe, the reader knows without a doubt, that the writer has lived his story in some fashion, to make it so true to those who have and have not been there. In that equality lies the miracle. Mary W. Black, Flagstaff, AZ

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant character study - of a city., May 27, 2008

By 

Elizabeth Talerman (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bright Shiny Morning (Hardcover)

500 pages in two sittings. I opened the book and was immersed in an utterly amazing character study, not of a person, but of a place, a city, a metropolis so vast and varied and unforgiving. A place of dreams and disasters. Of beauty an inch deep and a mile wide. Frey's depiction of L.A. is a masterpiece. But is it really a work of fiction?