Wellington Leg: Even the electronic version of the New York Times lands harder than its rivals with all the implied gravitas of a message from headquarters. All the news that is fit to print is a better slogan than most. Being book people we look to the Arts section for enlightenment and there it is a lengthy review of a novel written by James Frey called BRIGHT SHINY MORNING that the reviewer, Walter Kirn, didn’t like very much. Mr. Kirn dissects the work in the context of Frey’s now famous memoir, the one with how ever many little pieces it takes to create a bestseller.
Say what you will about James Frey, he is a successful writer in that he makes money, his works are trashed in all the right places, his prose secondary to this punishing celebrity he maintains through one ordeal after another. I don’t know if BRIGHT SHINY MORNING is the most important book reviewed on Fourth of July Weekend but James Frey is our most important writer. His is the face of our industry, he is the keeper of our dreams. If we had our own literary Rushmore we would sculpt his visage from rock.
He stands alone: Frey has suffered for us all. The royal bollocking from Oprah was a Moliere Moment when the artist faced certain death from an angry imperium, beheading, or quartering, or, worse yet, exile to a remote island. Of course he was exiled to Manhattan sheltered only by a storm of money in his disgrace. What would he do?
Man and Metaphor: I know you think I’m kidding when I say James Frey is our most important writer, but I’m not, and I’m not excluding proud subgroups like historians, biographers, citizen journalists, pundits, bandits, Pre-Agathaites, ruralists, urbanites, members of the Commonwealth. Frey is so much the hero of current publishing that he is the very thing we all aspire to when we seek to have our words published in print.
If you have the desire to understand publishing as a business, to look beyond the academic cringing at his output, study James Frey. Future generations may not. We have to, we don’t have the luxury of perpetual confusion. Let’s face it we want all to be Frey, or Freyed, or Freyesque. And, when summoned before the queen, we will kneel and be dubbed Sir James or be banished to the penal colony Trump Tower.