Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 Not one for the LA tourist board September 22, 2008
A very powerful book, written in the characteristic James Frey style that I loved in 'A million little pieces' (despite the controversy it's still a great book). A mind-boggling array of characters and stories that I couldn't stop reading about. The 'happy' stories are written in the same matter-of-fact style as the 'bad' stories which makes the book all the more powerful. Mr Frey does tend to enjoy looking at the darkest, most extreme aspects of human nature though, left me never wanting to visit LA!
 No credibility September 1, 2008
Unfortunately for me Frey no longer has any credibility, style or authenticity. This book could have been written by anyone who has watched too many TV documentaries.
 The first new direction in literature for centuries August 23, 2008
This is quite simply the best novel I have ever read, by a very long margin. It does everything that Pynchon tries to do but fails because he's too clever and abstract. Without ever using incomprehensible language James Frey breaks the ridiculous stranglehold of heroic plotting and focus on one individual to give us a novel with multiple points of interest that had me simply gasping for more and devastated when I came to the end.
Nothing I have ever read before achieved that.
 Disappointing August 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having loved A Million Little Pieces, I approached this book with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately it did not entertain me in the same way.
So many different characters were introduced, a short chapter each, and then they disappeared in favour of yet more characters. Occasionally we returned to a familiar name and went further with them but I found myself wondering with each page turn whether it would be yet again someone new.
When I hit a lenghty section on the history and geography of the Los Angeles road network I finally gave up.
The informative brief clips on the development of the state of LA from early times were mildly interesting but to a greater extent were interruptions to the flow(?) of the narrative.
I hate to be beaten by a book and I may return and give it another try in a few months, but for now I fear it's only 3 stars.
City Of Blinding Lights August 4, 2008
From what I've read elsewhere James Frey has already cut an infamous figure in literary circles with his debut book 'A Million Little Pieces'. Purported - at first - to be a personal memoir of his past, it was later exposed by the media as pure fiction instead. Cue huge public outrage and a public dressing down & humiliation on the Oprah Winfrey show. To be honest, I'd not heard a single word about all of this before I began this novel and I'm glad I didn't: 'Bright Shiny Morning' is absolutely brilliant regardless of any reputation Frey has.
This novel isn't easy to describe. There are 4 main plots and these are mixed in with either brief snapshots of other minor denizens of LA or various bits of trivia about the city today (for example a list of the innumerate murderous gangs that roam its streets). Every break in the book is punctuated with events in the history of the city in the form of a single paragraph on a single page. Like the city itself, the novel is a sprawling mix of these strands but it never complicates itself by twisting them all together. The brief snippets of history and one off stories here & there allow the 4 main plots to breathe independently.
I thoroughly enjoyed this innovative book from cover to cover. Aside from the book's wonderful structure, the 4 main stories reflect the best known aspects of LA (& America today) very well: the rich & famous, the down & out, the migrant worker and kids in search of the American Dream. I often did wonder amidst the bulk of the novel if some of the shorter ones would be expanded later on or somehow clash with the bigger stories but, on reflection now, I'm glad they didn't. Such is the vastness of LA's varied populace, perhaps leaving out other individual voices meant some parts had to stand alone (beguilingly) in the way they did. The novel is really is a such a huge, delicious yet terrifying mix of ideas and one started to sense that the lead character wasn't someone from the 4 main stories, but Los Angeles itself.
This is my novel of the year so far. By a country mile. A modern masterpiece.
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