Review Thursday: Dissolute Cities

“Nothing in this book can be considered reliable or accurate,” reads the jackassy disclaimer of James Frey’s third foray into fiction, Bright Shiny Morning. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on whether or not the writer who’s making self-aggrandizement cool again has mastered a sense of originality, I only remember being in the minority of people who thought A Million Little Pieces was corny and overblown. At the time I received of the phony memoir, I was reviewing books for the Quality Paperback Book Club, and I couldn’t fathom all buzz the book was getting. It’s main claim to fame seemed to be using Capitalization and punctuation incorrectly to Make. A. Point. Man. Also the bloody, no painkillers airplane scene. That was Intense. But it never seemed particularly Real. So Oprah revealed him as a Big Fake. Big Whoop.

This time around, people seem to be responding to Frey’s portrait of LA, or at least Janet Maslin is, pulling a Michiko Kakutani and writing the review of his book in his style. I just want to know why are people so impressed with writing like this, when there are so many similar, better books? It’s the same thing I thought when I picked up Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children. I had read it talked up in Elle (don’t mock me, they actually devote an admirable amount of ink to books), and so reserved a copy at the library. From all the advance notice, the book promised to be a riveting portrait of sketchy types in Las Vegas—you know, criminals! Broken dreams! Strippers! The porn industry! I like my salacious literary reads as much as the next girl, and I was all primed for a seedy vision of Las Vegas to wash over me.

Man, was I let down by this book. It felt as though the writer tried really hard but a book that should have been populated by the richness of intersecting lives had tumbleweeds rolling through it.

More than that, both books seem a pale shadow of an overlooked favorite of mine, a novel that takes a panoramic view of Los Angeles and delivers something funny, powerful, emotional, authentic and edgy. Not just James Frey posturing “edgy,” either. Really edgy. That book is I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner.
In an overflowing plot too complex to explain, Wagner gets up close to the lives of everyone from a heartbroken studio exec to a crazy masseuse who believe she can steal people’s energy. What continually impresses me about his writing is how well he modulates tone—one minute biting and satiric, the next, emotional and lyrical. I’ve always thought that his deserving novels are not given the praise and attention they deserve because they are about Hollywood, and regular people, for some reason, don’t read Hollywood novels. But in I’m Losing You and the later Still Holding (and you have to get past the groaning phone lingo inspired titles) he draws a bead on the human experience in extremity and comes up with something as invigorating as it is wrenchingly emotional. Wagner’s books always make me want to write, and for a populated panorama of a dissolute city, these more recent contenders just can’t hold a candle.