Tuesday, July 1, 2008

A MILLION LITTLE PEOPLES: I'm halfway through James Frey's weirdly riveting Bright Shiny Morning, so maybe this post is premature. Still, I figured I had to say that this should have been called A Field Guide to L.A. Stereotypes. The hard-working daughter of illegal immigrants who falls in love with the man whose house she cleans; the passengers just off of the bus from the video for "Welcome to the Jungle"; the self-absorbed and sexually voracious actor; the bikers; the cholos; the actresses who turn to prostitution; the moneyed and cynical; the ethnic; the poor; and so on. Are you kidding me? It's a testament to Frey's skill that the book is so eminently readable despite the clichés, all the more so because so little of it is occupied with recurring characters and the advancement of the plot (with long interstitial passages dedicated to vignettes or short recitations of factoids, some of which are recognizably true and some of which I'll just say, hmm, if Frey calls it fiction ...). At the halfway mark, this is a book for which one has no reason to apologize to Oprah.

So what are you reading?

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