"Literary train wreck" or "The Last Tycoon"?

Talk about an East Coast/West Coast culture war: Two well-known book critics have tackled the uneviable task of reading James Frey's new novel Bright Shiny Morning, and boy, do they have different takes on it.

In the Los Angeles Times, David Ulin calls it the worst book he has ever read.

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin compares Frey to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I've only flipped through the first several pages of the book, but it gave me an immediate headache, so I sense myself siding with Ulin and not because Frey makes such an attractive whipping boy. Maslin does that thing where she copies Frey's writing style in the review, or at least tries to, a terribly tricky thing to do (recently New York did a brilliant job reviewing Richard Price's Lush Life in that manner). Only Maslin doesn't...quite...get it right. It's like when a certain film critic I know turned in his review of The Grinch movie in verse, only it wasn't Dr. Seuss verse at all, it used long sentences and improper rhythm, and I clearly saved the critic's job by telling him I was not by God running that garbage in MY section, only he did not see it that way but rewrote it anyway because I have been known to have a temper, and many people fear me.

I digress.

Read Ulin's bashing here.

Read Maslin's praise here.

And if you feel you want to find out for yourself, for heaven's sake, go into a bookstore and read a few pages. Or visit your local library. Don't encourage HarperCollins by actually paying for the book.

Comments

[Connie]

An excerpt:

"They can see the glow a hundred miles away it's night and they're on an empty desert highway. They've been driving for two days. They grew up in a small town in Ohio they have known each other their entire lives, they have always been together in some way, even when they were too young to know what it was or what it meant, they were together."

I'm already annoyed. Seriously. The random punctuation is pointless.