I’ve never been particularly wooed by the bright lights of Hollywood, perhaps because I’m carrying some leftover disturbia from a painful period of my school life when my name was paired with that of a boy, last name Wood, whom I wouldn’t have married if you paid me the net worth of the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but I was taunted as sitting-in-a-tree with him all the same. Well, maybe for that kind of due-reward, I’d reconsider. But I’d never fully comprehended life in Los Angele’s, the bustling bosom in which Hollywood sits until I got my hands on this book.
I read James Frey’s ‘A Million Little Pieces’ slowly and methodically about 2 years ago, it was like forcing a wet cloth down my throat every time I laid eyes on its volatile pages, but it was absolutely compelling reading. Firstly, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, to get inside what provoked Oprah’s famous literary tantrum, to say I had survived it. Me and my mind, alone, with that brutal book. But what quickly over-took the experience, more than any hard to bear reading was his intriguing style of writing. An absolute knack for manipulating the story’s intensity with unabashed wordy glee.
Bright Shiny Morning is a much lighter load, laced with neon lights and cheeky bites of western popular culture. It has a dark, gritty but gloriously sinister undertone, and contains all the hallmarks of Frey’s now revered style of fiction; its a non-stop. start. race through every crevice of the city. The theme plays right into the heart of something I love to explore both in writing and in life; documenting a scene, scratching below the surface of a new place; an undisturbed evocative journey into a sub-culture. And here, Frey presents a leering look into LA’s unexplored underworld.
The book moves at pace between the characters and a fact-o-rama style history of LA, and the way the story of each character concludes is both everything and nothing like you expect; you’re left feeling uneasy, like it ended too soon, like you want- need- more; to see and feel it like he did. You feel you could burst out the gates into the California sunshine at LAX tomorrow, show yourself around town with ease and pick those very people out of the throngs of thousands that wander the city. Watch them throw themselves aimlessly at the fame-lined perils of La La Land, and be able to say you survived it.
