Hype and Hypodermy

james Frey "wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generation." Which is commendable. But the press’ careless comparison of wunderkind literary talents like Frey to erstwhile sensations can be more agitating than another novel about a recovering addict. Is he the next Dave Eggers? David Foster Wallace? William Burroughs? Charles Bukowski? You know, Gus Van Sant loves his work. (He seems to get excited by a lot of people’s work.) So does Bret Easton Ellis. (Is that good or bad?) Pat Conroy calls A Million Little Pieces "the War and Peace of addiction." It’s judicious to remain skeptical about hype. Hype can easily lead to unwarranted reviews of acclaim, or conversely, reflexive pessimism. After all, the list of comers that never came is incalculable. Hype is the reason thousands bought Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Reality is the reason not many of them finished reading it.

At first glance, Frey’s endlessly ballyhooed debut, A Million Little Pieces, could be seen as a weary, egotistical surrender to the all-too-familiar story of traumatic addiction and recovery. It’s not that we can’t empathize with the plight, it’s just that we’ve heard, read and seen it once too often. The prescribed addict’s story begins with unbridled depravity and ends with irrepressible self-destruction before the protagonist saves himself in the nick of time—predictably under the tutelage of a wise, aging addict espousing the virtues of a 12-step program. Luckily, A Million Little Pieces saves us from this fatigued recipe. Frey’s literary memoir has a lot more going on, and none of it is formulaic. Sparse, unaffected prose jams through the sometimes-intricate, sometimes-simple deliberations and perceptions of an addict like no book since Permanent Midnight.

It’s understood that the peripheral commotion caused by a writer is often more valuable than talent, and Frey has not retreated from his own commotion. In a now-famous New York Observer piece, "Meet the New Staggering Genius," he gave us a glimpse of his tough, everyman demeanor. "I don’t give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don’t give a fuck what any of these people do. I don’t hang out with them, I’m not friends with them, I’m not part of the literati. I think of myself as outside of this publishing culture." Maybe it’s an act, but it’s easy to be convinced that the writer is authentic. You feel it in his writing, and you sense it in his interviews.

Frey’s acerbic temperament does not change the fact that A Million Little Pieces is an intimate, vivid and heartfelt memoir. A recovering alcoholic and crack addict—he also admits to using "cocaine…pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue"—Frey begins his recovery after waking up on a plane so physically battered by his addictions that a host of doctors are astonished that he’s still breathing. So at 23, after 10 years of addiction, he decides to clean up. Refreshingly, Frey takes full responsibility for the mess, and the disastrous consequences of failing his rehabilitation. With haphazard punctuation and a curious grammatical style that lends itself perfectly to the austere text, Frey portrays the precarious relationships of those in recovery, his friendship with a wounded hooker, an addicted mobster and an alcoholic judge.

For most of the book, Frey wants to die. And you believe him. After his family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, "the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Treatment Facility in the World," touting its 17% recovery rate (yes, that’s good), reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, and the ominous ghost of relapse, you understand why. For Frey, there are no moral differences between addictions: "The life of an addict is always the same. It doesn’t matter whether the addiction is drug, alcohol, crime, sex, shopping, food, gambling, television, or the fucking Flintstones." Some kill you, others don’t.

Much like an addict, the life of a rising star is also always the same. It just doesn’t end the same. Can Frey be the greatest literary writer of his generation? Maybe.

A Million Little Pieces By James Frey, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 386 pages, $29.95