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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
To be sure, Frey has perfected his own style or, rather, anti-style: his is a Kerouacian, expletive-laced, bare-bones kind of writing that eschews punctuation and radiates machismo. Oprah -- who admits that "A Million Little Pieces" is "a radical departure" for her book club -- says it's "raw"; another reader might find it numbing. "Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don't want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but..." Frey writes, on and on until "I start to cry. I start to cry. I start to cry." He's filled another page where each line consists on just one or two words: "Damage irreparable./ Cry./ Fight./ Mom./ Dad./ Brother./ Cry./ Fight./ Live./ Torch./ Pipe./ Bottle..."
Is this even writing? All of "A Million Little Pieces" is like this. His autobiography on the "Oprah" Web site is like this (though, to be fair, he uses more commas). In the book, each time he leans over the toilet to regurgitate bits of his stomach, he tries to drive home how hard and gross and painful it is to get off drugs. ("I crawl to the front of the toilet," he writes. "When I get to the toilet, I vomit. The vomit is full of bile and brown shit that I have never seen before. It is full of blood. It burns my stomach, my throat and my mouth. It burns my lips and my face. It won't stop. I heave and it comes, the burning vomit comes and comes again and again.") But too often the horror of his reality is made unreal by his posturing, by his aggressive toughness, by the monotonous rhythm of the way he writes. If Frey's story is powerful at all it's for the facts -- the sickness, the hurt, the fatigue of withdrawal -- not for his rendition of them.
When Oprah started her book club, she quickly became the most powerful advocate for reading in America -- reading novels, in particular. With our culture so heavily focused on literature of self-improvement and health (see the endurance of Kevin Trudeau's "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About" and Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz's "You: The Owner's Manual" on the bestseller lists), Oprah did a worthy and wonderful thing by encouraging so many people to read fiction. Of course some of Oprah's fans were readers before, but surely thousands of others hadn't picked up a novel in years, let alone participated in a discussion of its shape and story. Oprah has spawned an entire population of serious readers -- who else can claim such an achievement?
And what about her impact on the publishing industry? A literary novel that sells 20,000 copies is considered a success; many books bearing Oprah's stamp have moved a million copies or more. As Sonny Mehta, the chairman of the literary publisher Knopf, told the New York Times recently, ''The fact that [Oprah] had 300,000 people reading William Faulkner over the summer -- she should be given a cabinet post.''
Like practically everyone else in America, I love Oprah. However, I can't help but hope that she'll return to fiction again soon or, at the very least, choose a different kind of nonfiction book for her next club -- something that seems more distinct from the other content on her show. The problem isn't that Frey's book is a memoir per se; it's that it's a memoir of addiction, of recovery -- and a bad one at that. The books in her club -- especially during the "classics" years -- were markedly different from much of the rest of Oprah's show, which already covers this terrain. With James Frey, the book club is losing its identity as a literary feature, morphing into yet another vehicle for self-help. His story might be shocking, but it isn't art.
Of course, it's possible that after finishing "A Million Little Pieces" Oprah's viewers will agree. We'll see how the ubiquitous "fuck's" and puke scenes go down, not to mention the endless one-word sentences. Maybe, after years of coaching from Oprah herself, her acolytes will see Frey's memoir for what it is: the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him.
