Bright Shiny Morning

Wow, I had the best time with this big exuberant book, a fact-fiction guide to Los Angeles that sprawls like the city itself across 400+ pages and if you haven't been, after reading this you won't need to, or possibly won't want to.

It's a series of short stories - some less than a page long - covering the lives of LA residents - actors, art dealers, journalists, gangsters, immigrants, mini-golf proprietors, rough sleepers...there is barely a facet he doesn't cover in some way or another. I'm not normally a fan of short stories, but the skill of this author is in making the reader care about his characters within seconds. I can't explain why, but it's a magic ingredient and he's got it. Of the many hundreds of characters met within the show more course of the book, most will not be encountered again, but four storylines are continued at intervals throughout the book. Three are ramped up to a moment of high tension towards the end, and it was only at this point that I slightly resented the intervening fact chapters, lists and so on that prevented me finding out what happened next.

Like so many other books these days, this one eschews speech marks ( and commas too for the most part). I've whinged many a time about authors who do this, and normally I'd take at least one star off the rating, but there were times when I thought it helped the story along. In conversations between two people, you can always figure out who's speaking, and I found I was gliding effortlessly through the prose as though on skates - it was good to be free of the million-and-one synonyms for "said" and the intrusive descriptions of facial contortions you get with some books (yes Twilight I'm talking about you).

Where this technique falls down is where you have more than two people in a conversations, and let's face it, it does happen from time to time. Then it gets really complicated. The author chooses to precede speech with the speaker's name, rather like a play, but the name appears on the line above, and it gets doubly confusing if a person speaks another person's name. It all leads me back to thinking speech marks are there for a reason, and all these authors trying to reinvent the wheel - or trying to de-invent it, or pretend we never needed the damned wheel in the first place - should just stop it. But that's just my opinion, and I'm not taking any stars off my rating because I loved loved loved this book, faults and all. show less

I’ve never been to Los Angeles nor have I ever had the desire to visit. Reading James Frey’s book just confirms my gut instinct to stay away from LA, stay away at all cost. That being said, Frey’s novel is a tour de force of contemporary fiction. Frey’s characters follow the American Dream west until the land stops, and it seemingly always stops in LA. Multi-layered vignettes interspersed with history and facts of Los Angeles County end up giving the reader a realistic picture of modern LA. Whether from the perspective of an immigrant family, two Midwest teens escaping their oppressive home life, a beach bum, or the biggest movie star in the world, these parallel universes depict Los Angeles for the nightmare that far more often show more results from chasing or even attaining the dream than the illusory fairy tale ending. Incorporating a reportage writing style (I wonder if this is ironic or intentional given Frey’s Oprah moment) the book nonetheless is an indictment on the mirage that is Hollywood. One is left to conclude that the people who weave in and out of the novel are enslaved to their circumstances regardless of the purported idyllic surroundings. As the novel winds down it is indicated that LA, in some aspects, is the new New York. Perhaps so, but with the new NY you get the old NY problems too; congestion, vice, violence, mass poverty, and inequity of power. There may be a bright shiny morning somewhere and it may not be in NY but it surely isn’t in LA either. show less

Wow. As a native of Los Angeles (though long removed), I appreciated James Frey's treatment of the pulse of LA. There is so much more to Los Angeles than the glittery facade seen (and dreamt of) on TV or the Silver Screen. His writing style should be considered very annoying, BUT it works so well in Bright Shiny Morning; the use of oddly constructed run-on sentences developed an almost poetic cadence. And his use of lists and odd facts--brilliant! An excellent read for those of us who have seen (and lived in) the background of LA.

Bright Shiny Morning is a chaotic snapshot of L.A. It’s like a music video but without the music or the video. Fictional vignettes, sometimes entertaining though more often predictable and trite, are jumbled with more mundane elements like lists of ‘fun facts’ about L.A., descriptions of highways, historical events, and other minutiae. The book goes something like this: vignette about two in-love teenagers coming to L.A. to escape their abusive parents—cut to a list of the names of all the gangs in L.A.—cut to a one-page snippet about an aspiring actress promised a job in exchange for sex—cut to a three-sentence description of L.A. bank robberies in 1895—cut to a vignette about a self-absorbed movie superstar and his show more problems with his boyfriends—cut to a dull recitation of all the natural disasters that have ever hit L.A. In Bright Shiny Morning, nothing is sustained and nothing lasts. At times, Frey’s quick-paced prose is a refreshing break from the more mundane aspects of this novel, but he indulges too often in repetition. A couple typical examples:

The children thought she was crazy, they were all still scared of him. He seemed bigger every day. He was bigger every day.

Every night before he went to sleep he lay in bed and dreamed, lay in bed and dreamed.

I suspect Frey is trying to add a certain weightiness with this repetition, but I found it to be an annoying affectation, especially after seeing it on almost every page. Although Frey succeeds in capturing the frenetic and ephemeral aspects of modern L.A., I was left feeling this is a 500-page book with nothing in it that’s real or important.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License (short reviews, real opinions): litlicense.blogspot.com show less

I find Frey to be an outstanding author with an original, energetic writing style. This novel is a powerful tale about LA and it’s inhabitants. He tells of both the seedy and the sunny side of this famous city and describes the inhabitants’ lifestyles with a shocking clarity. Frey tells his story through the narrative of several different characters who all seem to have lost their way in life; a young couple on the run from unhappy homes, a Mexican maid who is embarrassed by her disfigured body, a group of drunks and junkies who all live by the beach and an extremely famous film star who is married but secretly gay. Sprinkled in among their tales are facts and statistics which Frey himself points out may not necessarily be correct. show more It made me smile when I opened my copy for the first time I saw in large print - 'Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable'. This whole book is a jumble of stories that all seem to knit together to form an amazing tale of people trying to live their lives as best they can against all odds. Humorous but poignant at times this was a true page-turner for me and I relished every word. show less

James Frey has once again stolen my heart, chopped it up, sewed it back together with rugged lines and sharp edges, and replaced it. My eyes are eternally opened whenever I read one of his novels, because living in East Coast suburbia oftentimes makes me forget about the 'other'.

I love this book.

Frey's erratic sentence structure and lack of punctuation initially annoyed me, but by page 3 I was consummed in the stories. Frey is a master storyteller because he knows what we want to read. We want to read about people like us so we know we're not the only ones in our situation. On the other hand, we want to read about people who are better off than us (celebrities, their kids, their agents) and worse off than us (Joe the homeless show more Chablis-loving gentleman, Dylan and Maddie the teen runaways, Esperanza the 'thick' and only legal Mexican living in a 17-person home). show less

This was a fantastic book! I love Frey's style, very Kerouac, with little regard for punctuation, grammar or "appropriate language". This story is about LA, and the characters help to flesh out the wild contrasts between the lifestyles in LA: The extraordinarily rich (struggling with choices of WHICH $10,000 suit to wear...), the homeless (choices of which bottle of wine and how long you need to panhandle to get it), the immigrants (coping with daily racism, family struggles and the desire for their children to succeed), and the every day people who move to LA hoping for a better life away from their dysfunctional families. In between on-going storylines you have sections of history of LA (short) and "fun facts"; statistics about show more bizarre laws, etc. that make LA unique. I started this book reluctantly, as I had heard about the strange style of this book (jumping from one character to another, some to never be heard from again). But that tendency died out early in the book and Frey started to narrow his focus on a handful of characters in more depth. Like his previous two books, this story is told with great passion, romance, realism and humor. Frey is a very creative and innovative artist and I'm sick of people who choose to focus on the lie/Oprah thing and completely avoid the fact that he is a great, creative writer! show less