KEY POINTS:
James Frey, the American writer disgraced two years ago when his so-called memoir about addiction, A Million Little Pieces, was exposed as a fraud, has dared to resurface, this time with a novel, Bright Shiny Morning. It has earned him many plaudits but wait, here come the niggles all over again.
Notwithstanding his opening disclaimer that "nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable", some denizens of the blogosphere have been unable to resist. They are claiming that the novel, featuring a cavalcade of scoundrels and saints in modern LA, is peppered with historical errors.
If the attacks are sharp, Mr Frey can probably withstand them. His return has mostly been hailed as triumphant by the critics. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin called him a "furiously good storyteller". Better still, in one week the book has sold at least 14,343 copies and is in the top 10 bestsellers list.
Nothing, moreover, is likely to match the horror of first being championed by Oprah Winfrey for Pieces, only to have her publicly turn on him when its truthfulness was challenged.
The panning for inaccuracies has mostly been done with humorous affection. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, chose to examine just a few of his "fun facts" about the City of Angels, such as the claim that it has a museum devoted to bananas (it used to until it relocated) and that 300 buffalo roam within its borders (actually they are restricted to Catalina Island, part of LA County). But bloggers tend to be serious, not to say pedantic, folk.
"Frey interweaves the narrative with bits of Los Angeles history," writes Frances Dinkelspiel.
"Problem is, he gets many of these wrong. You would have thought after his public humiliation on Oprah he would have learned to double-check what he wrote."
So what did he get wrong? Frey asserts that the city's first newspaper, the Daily Herald, first appeared in 1873. Actually two other papers existed before then. He says that the city's population in 1865 stood at 14,000 when it was about a third of that. According to Dinkelspiel, the writer also mangles well-known episodes in the early development of Los Angeles, including the sequence of events that led the municipal authorities to gain control from private speculators of its precious water supply, and the foundation of its banks.
The debacle that followed Pieces led to legal challenges from readers, and even a court agreement to refund buyers of the book who felt cheated. (In the end, only about 12,000 bothered to make a claim.) Whether or not Frey knew that some of his historical references in the new book might be shaky, his disclaimer at the start presumably protects him this time around.
- INDEPENDENT
