After publishing two best-selling memoirs, “A Million Little Pieces” and “My Friend Leonard,” which proved upon examination to be insufficiently factual, James Frey has brought forth a novel, “Bright Shiny Morning,” whose greatest problem (though not its only one) is that it’s insufficiently fictional. The offense in the case of the first two narratives, which tried to pass off fantasy as fact, was merely ethical. But in the case of “Bright Shiny Morning,” which brims with facts but is lacking in credible fantasies, the failure is artistic  and thus, from a certain perspective, far more grievous. Frey’s “memoirs,” despite or because of their being made up, were at least somewhat stimulating in places. His “novel,” which isn’t made up enough, is stupefying.

“Bright Shiny Morning” is about Los Angeles, a city whose peculiar role in modern American literature is to function not just as a setting but a character. The main one, inevitably. The lead. When it comes to the city of broken dreams, literary custom has decreed that the city, not its dreamers, must take precedence. It isn’t like this with Buffalo or Tucson or even, to the same extent, New York. In those and a thousand other municipalities about which writers feel less compelled to moralize, people still act with a measure of seeming autonomy, but in Los Angeles human beings are treated by novelists as puny appendages of a vast colossus. Free will is a cruel illusion there, at best, and corruption exerts an irresistible suction on anyone with a trace of worldly ambition. To succeed, a person must lose his soul, and the people who keep their souls cannot succeed.

Frey is unswervingly loyal to these orthodoxies. The stock assortment of yearning wannabes, maniacal somebodies and oppressed nonentities that he sacrifices to Los Angeles’s tar pits have all played the same roles before in other scripts. Dylan and Maddie, from small-town Ohio, play the doomed youngsters whose kin don’t understand them, causing them to pile into an old truck and tear off like lemmings “driving towards the glow.” Amberton Parker is the matinee idol whose manly posturing hides a terrible secret that any non-Amish American past age 12 will guess at the moment he strides onstage. Esperanza is the Mexican servant girl whose job is to pick up after sadistic Anglos and, when the time comes, be seduced by one of them. Then there’s Joe, the drunken bum, who in his drunken bumness is strangely noble. After ending up in Los Angeles for no good reason except that it’s where drifters run out of continent, he “stood on the sand staring across the ocean” and “heard one word  here here here.” This is one word repeated three times, of course, and that’s because Frey’s idea of meaningful prose  the kind that conveys not just information but feeling  is that it must possess lots of rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. Minus the commas commas commas.

Image James Frey Credit... Karen Caldicott

Here is some of Frey’s prose, ladled up from the huge pitcher in which he has blended events, ideas, dialogue and dozens of pages of Wikipedian trivia relating to everything from Los Angeles’s freeways to its neighborhoods and street gangs into a sort of verbal fruit smoothie every sip of which has the same consistency. This passage deals with Dylan eating supper in the flea-bag motel room where he and Maddie have landed after pursuing the elusive glow. “When he finishes his first helping he gets another, he finishes that gets another. While he’s working on the third she puts the pie in the oven warms it up. By the time’s finished with his fourth, and the bucket of chicken is empty, she has a piece of warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream ready for him. He eats most of it with his hands when he’s done he licks the plate clean he has another does the same thing. When he’s finished he leans back in his chair, rubs his stomach, speaks.”