The popularity of James Frey’s new novel—he admits this one’s a novel, which is novel—may have more to do with curiosity than the merits of the book. Frey, as everyone recalls, is the memoirist whose back-to-back blockbusters, A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard, were exposed as hoaxes, leading to the author’s cringe-worthy televised whuppin’ on the Oprah Winfrey show (Winfrey, of course, had a legitimate beef—her book club endorsement made Frey a literary sensation, an oracle among recovering addicts, and a multimillionaire). Frey’s public evisceration was a warning shot to all writers tempted to “improve” non-fiction by fictionalizing it. When he was properly pilloried, most observers thought the author would crawl into his bank vault and never be heard from again. But he’s back, in what the Los Angeles Times calls a big sloppy mess of a book, and the New York Times hails as a masterpiece. Bright Shiny Morning attempts to sum up the circus that is L.A. through a motley cast of quirky characters: a closeted gay movie star and his wife; a pair of crazy kids on a moped, whose trip to the City of Angels was financed by stolen gang money; a wise and humble homeless man who lives in a gas station restroom; an insecure Latina who falls in love with the son of her wealthy employer… You get the picture—all God’s children, the tall and the small, representing life’s rich pageant as seen through James Frey’s penthouse window. Through vignettes presented in the author’s patented staccato prose—sans punctuation, sans paragraphs, running on and on, goofily, distractedly—these characters purport to embody “a city, a culture and an age.” If not for Frey’s fame as a faker, Bright Shiny Morning might be enjoyable in a lurching, unsteady, idiosyncratic way. But his prior indiscretions prove he’s a sticky sentimentalist pretending to be a cynic, a squashy softie acting like a big tough guy, and an all-around hack who specializes in the painfully predictable story arc. As a result, this book—all 500 mind-numbing pages of it—comes across as insincere. Sorry, James. You blew your cover.

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