Tuesday, January 10, 2006
a million little pieces
For the record, James Frey's novel is shit. Something white American modernists could have scratched onto paper while sleeping. And isn't Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and anything by William S. Burroughs the best drug novels ever? Do you need the stamp of "nonfiction" to believe that being strung out is oh so bad? And now the idea of 'fiction' is being questioned by millions of unimaginative people. Memoir-as-fiction is certainly not new, but fiction-as-memoir is indeed offensive to all the writers who slang imagined worlds. "The material of fiction is the texture of experience" Samuel R. Delany once said. Wordbomb: don't read tv novels. Yet.
And then, you get JT Leroy. Turns out he/she is a walking character. There are too many levels of irony here. I like the idea of JT Leroy: a marketing construction where a ghostwriter proves the spectacle of the publishing industry. But, I don't like the idea that people sympathized with this terrible "writer".
Thumbs down.
