"A Bullet in the Heart of that Bullshit"
Salon today has an interesting article by novelist Louis Bayard about the hot new literary sensation, James Frey. Frey has become a hot new sensation by the seemingly tired route of writing a memoir about his drug addiction (called "A Million Little Pieces") and giving interviews where he trashes other writers, like Dave Eggers, and says "fuck" a lot.
Bayard's feeling seems to be that Frey is a good writer who has produced a worthy book and should avoid giving too many embarrassing interviews, but from the excerpted passages of Frey's book it's hard to see how he reached that conclusion. Although I obviously can't review a book I never read, none of the following makes me likely to remedy that situation by investing in this book:
* "I open the door and I walk out. I make my way back to the Unit. Night has fallen and the Halls are dark. Overhead lights illuminate them. I hate the lights I want them gone. I wish the Halls were darker. I am craving the dark the darkest darkness the deep and horrible hole. I wish the Halls were fucking black. My mind is black my heart is black I wish the Halls were black. If I could, I would destroy the lights above me with a fucking bat. I would smash them to fucking pieces. I wish the Halls were black."
* "I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can."
* "The Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, Hell and their accompaniment are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. The loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust of reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity of myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything."
According to Bayard, who has read this work of genius, these examples are as good a sample of Frey's writing as in anything in the book, which makes Bayard's praise for it all the more baffling. These passages read less like an addiction memoir than a parody of addiction memoirs.
It seems pointless to describe in detail what's wrong with this kind of writing (if you can't appreciate the pure comedy gold in the lines, "I want a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck" you should stop reading now), but it's worth noting that nothing with construction so inelegant, with grammar so pretentious (drop the Germanic capitalizations and put in some commas, for God's sake), and with a sentence like "If I could, I would destroy the lights above me with a fucking bat" is going to be avidly devoured by generations of readers to come. The last line alone, rather than conjuring up dramatic images of an existential agony of Job-like proportions, suggests nothing so much as a comedy sketch where British soccer thugs recite their self-penned poetry.
Frey seems like a male counterpart to that most Nineties of writers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and it's surprising that literary people can still get excited about something as dated as an addiction/recovery memoir. The central ideas of writing like this are that (a) there is no subject matter apart from the writer and (b) the writer is a bold pioneer just for talking about things like this. It's worthless to complain that a memoir about rich white people who do terrible things to themselves lacks context, because putting those experiences in context would kill the possibility of writing a book like this. They can only exist because of an overwhelming narcissism on the part of their creators.
This isn't literature that is supposed to connect with readers in the way that, say, "The Great Gatsby" is. That's another book about rich white people doing terrible things to themselves, but generations of readers have loved it because it's really about more than that; as Greil Marcus wrote, when Gatsby loses it's clear that we all do, too. That's not the feeling one gets from reading Wurtzel/Frey literature; we're not supposed to feel a part of the story, we're supposed to admire the writers for going through such trauma and emerging, newborn, with a work of staggering genius in hand. It's the literary equivalent of watching "extreme" sports: you admire the feats while subconsciously understanding that this is something you would never otherwise have any part in.
As both George Trow and Boys Against Girls noted, this is the context of no context. And, as GvsB sang, in that context, "Everywhere cool is nothing new." So, while literary folks are busy pretending that they admire horribly ugly sentences like " I am craving the dark the darkest darkness the deep and horrible hole," I will continue being happily uncool and eagerly awaiting the next Thomas Ligotti book.
- Consider Arms
9:32:21 AM 
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