Alaska Employment Law

You probably remember James Frey’s notorious “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, which was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club because of its story of “redemption.”  When Pieces – a story about the author’s drugged and drunken youth, followed by his recovery – turned out to be fictional in numerous particulars, Winfrey denounced the book as “lies” and a personal “betrayal.”  Sic transit gloria mundi.  For that matter, sic transit Oprah, as far as Mr. Frey was concerned.

Frey is back with Bright Shiny Morning, a novel, and so far as I can tell, the only people who seem to like it are Janet Maslin, in her review in the New York Times daily paper (the Times Book Review panned it), the reviewer in USA Today, and me.  Well, there have to be a few other people:  the book briefly crawled up the best seller lists, and then fell off.

Bright Shiny Morning cannot be understood, I think, unless the reader perceives that the City of Los Angeles is itself a character, even the main character, of the novel.  (I am reminded in this connection of one of my favorite lines from Kerouac, in On the Road:  “There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded – at least that’s what I thought then.”)  Frey’s plot device is to give us four separate narratives about an assortment of very rich and very poor characters and their problems in, and dare I say with, the City.  Interspersed among these tales (which do not intersect, except for happening in Los Angeles) are “chapters” containing recitations of facts about the history and rise and nature of Los Angeles, not as a narrative story, just as facts.  The facts are of every variety, and they have a cumulative effect, of a place too big to control or understand, of a place lacking any kind of moral center.  Any kind at all.

The four human plots?  I borrow from Maslin’s review, which consciously emulates Frey’s style in the book.  First, there are the

“two [Hollywood] superstars, Amberton and Casey.  A man and a woman, married to each other, best friends both gay no secrets.  Everything perfect, supposed to look that way.  Prop children.  Money houses cars personal assistants nannies yoga teacher everything perfect.  Wearing vicuña.  Eating ahi tuna.  Still Amberton wanted more, got a crush on an ex-football player.  All this captured with elegance, with wit.  Movie stars.

“So there were Maddie and Dylan, young and in love, eking out a living and traveling on a moped, he eventually got a job as a caddy she as a clerk.  The book loved them.  There was Old Man Joe, homeless guy, living in a bathroom in Venice, California, somehow stronger more decent more heroic than the star who plays movie heroes.

“And Esperanza, Mexican-American, working as a maid for an old white lady so mean she threw her morning cup of coffee if Esperanza didn’t make it right.  But the old lady turned out to have a son.  He liked Esperanza, liked treating her like a human being.  Maybe he liked needling his mother even better.

“So the Bright Shiny Morning guy  … [lets these stories] play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit.  The son steals the maid’s virtue?  Been there, read that.  They plot against the old lady?  Been there too.”

Frey chooses to draw very warm and credible human portraits of some characters – Old Man Joe, Dylan, Maddie, and Esperanza to a lesser extent – against caricatures of others, notably Amberton and Esperanza’s “old lady” employer.  If that seems to you to line up so that the poor people are real and the rich people are fake, I think you’re getting it.  But the poor people do not do very well in this book.  The City, with ferocious appetite, eats them up.