James Frey is kind of the Nixon of the literary world, but that didn’t stop me from reading his novel, “Bright Shiny Morning”  or from liking “A Million Little Pieces”- even after the Oprah Winfrey debacle. I like his writing style; in particular, I like his natural-sounding dialogue and his absolute refusal to adhere to the standards of punctuation that the rest of us reluctantly have to follow.

James Frey uses a similar writing style in “Bright Shiny Morning”  to the style he uses in “A Million Little Pieces”, but because "Bright Shiny Morning" is little more disjointed, it might take a couple of chapters to get into the flow of the book. ”Bright Shiny Morning” parallels numerous fictitious lives across the city of Los Angeles and is interspersed with facts and snippets about the the history of LA, the majority of which are negative.

Frey does not sugar-coat his perspective on the city of Los Angeles, either in most of the facts he included or in the personal stories of the many characters in the book, who represent a huge cross-section of the population. “Bright Shiny Morning” focuses on everyone from a Hollywood couple with an unusual and very private arrangement to a golf caddy and his wife trying to make it in the city. For the most part, the lives of characters in the books do not intersect. While some of the characters are shinier than others, Frey makes it obvious throughout the novel that the sparkly facts included in the book do little to hide the darker side of the city.


Some of the facts are more interesting than others and I think that he included too many. Samples of the more interesting fact include:

• There is a museum devoted to the banana. It has almost 20,000 banana-related items.
• The average citizen owns 6.4 pairs of underwear.
• In 1985, there are 800 gang-related deaths in the city of Los Angeles.

While I thought he included too many facts about LA in the book, reading Frey’s dialogue made the novel really worthwhile for me. In fact, the edition of the book I read had an essay from Frey at the end. In the essay, he talks about his unique writing style and discusses importance of both the rhythm in dialogue and genuine-sounding dialogue.