Review by New York Times Review
"KATERINA," JAMES FREY'S first adult novel in 10 years, claims Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" as its literary North Star. The first-person narrator, Jay, is a former "Bad Boy of American Letters" who has abandoned his self-proclaimed Sisyphean struggle to run a company that "publishes commercial fiction and creates intellectual property for large media companies." A jaded Angeleno, Jay is paid "stupid amounts of money" and surrounded by standard-issue signifiers of success - three cars, two kids, a wife, a pool, a housekeeper - a fate he bemoans with his agent while poolside at (where else?) the Beverly Hills Hotel. Jay's ennui is punctuated by the receipt of a series of Facebook messages from a former lover, the titular Katerina, who at first uses an alias to contact him. Shifting between present-day Los Angeles and Paris in 1992, Jay recalls with euphoria his time abroad when the goal was to "be happy and spend our days in pursuit of pleasure and pain and every form of lust and desire that exists." The impetus for his sojourn to Paris? A copy of "Tropic of Cancer" left for him by his college roommate. Unfortunately, Jay's Paris lacks the soul, guts and groin of Miller's rendering, reading more like a student's account of his study abroad - complete with impressions of the "Mona Lisa" and Pere Lachaise, and odes to the baguette and the hookers of Pigalle. There's the requisite bohemian apartment "covered with empty wine bottles and ashtrays" where the bedroom is a mattress on the floor. There's selftalk like " Get a beret. Wear the beret. Don't be afraid of the beret." There's the "joint in the 11th that sells absinthe if you know the secret password (Rimbaud)" (what else?). Is this the Boulevard de Clichy or Boulevard de Cliché? Jay is well aware he's not the first writer or expatriate to have traversed St.-Germain in an alcoholic stupor or a lovesick trance, incorporating homages to literary forefathers like Hemingway, Wilde, Hugo, Fitzgerald, Baudelaire, Beckett and, of course, Miller. But in Jay's search for "crazy crazy mad love," Frey conveys nothing so emotionally evocative that it builds on the work of these predecessors. Rather, the Katerina of Jay's memory is a shell of a muse: a paper doll with "thick pouty lips like cherry pie" whose history is summed up in a mere paragraph or two. He calls her "Model Girl." She calls him "Writer Boy." Their bond, while intended to be emotional, reads as purely carnal: a physical connection that could easily possess its own depths if Frey approached sex with more knowing nuance. Jay and Katerina "Kiss. Stare. Smile. Whisper. Laugh. Slow and deep. Fast and hard." Her vagina is the "most magnificent most delirious most peaceful" vagina in the "entire history of existence," yet we are never told what it looks, smells or tastes like. Even when wet, Katerina is ever the dry fantasy, tossing off orgasm after orgasm from penetration alone. Each of Jay's women - and there are several in the book - is also suspiciously easily-turned-on. A quickie against a car with a college ex results in simultaneous orgasms that leave her "shaking." One wonders if our protagonist knows what cunnilingus is at all? The book's end feels similarly hasty, employing Katerina as more of a prop than a well-developed character. This objectification might serve the book better if Frey used it to question the nature of fantasy love as a reflection of ourselves, and not so much the object of our desires. For a recovering alcoholic and addict, Jay is bafflingly unable to turn that same lens on his emotional life or question the relationships between romantic passion, obsession and compulsion. The reader is left only with a clumsy plot device that is meant to elicit emotion but lacks self-awareness. Jay's libertine dreams similarly leave the reader cold. He frequently professes a desire to "burn the world down," but one wonders which world he is talking about exactly. Is it the world of literary formalities, codes and mores? Is it the rules of love, which as he asserts to Katerina are "made to be ... smashed"? Or is this the resurrection of his rebellious and artistic spirit, which he sold willingly "in the most American of activities, capitalism and commerce"? The fire of this canned sort of mutiny is pitted far too neatly against a hackneyed depiction of social conformity: "Go to school, follow the rules, get a job, work save vote obey." What's more, the thematic dichotomy between freedom and responsibility is wrought with far too heavy a hand - especially when coupled with realizations like "You have to dream new dreams or you ... die," or Katerina's assertion, "If you burn the world down, it's very likely you burn yourself in the process." One wonders what is really being rebelled against. The revelation that Frey's 2003 book, "A Million Little Pieces," was not a straight-up work of nonfiction as he had originally presented it led to a conversation around how much of a writer's imagined life can be viewed as autobiographical. Ultimately, that text was reframed and is today sold as a novel. With "Katerina," the question of autobiography doesn't matter so much. Regardless of how true this tale is to Frey's own personal story, the fictional version cries out for a richer, more succulent imagining. MELISSA broder is the author of "The Pisces."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
In 2017, famous writer Jay starts receiving Facebook messages from a name he doesn't recognize. Immediately, he takes readers back to 1992, when he left college just shy of graduating to live in Paris and devote himself to writing. Paris indeed fuels his creative pursuits, and also his hunger for alcohol, cocaine, and hot one-night stands. He meets enchanting Scandinavian model Katerina in front of Rodin's Gates of Hell, and soon sees her everywhere. She is charmed by him, too: his railing against literary rules and ambition to write books that ""burn the fucking world down."" As the novel jumps between Jay's present-day professional despair and his turbulent Paris year, the messaging stranger's identity becomes clear and at times acts as a sort of subconscious, allowing Jay to work through the scandal that followed his success; his artistic dream that came true, then became a nightmare. If Frey (Bright Shiny Morning, 2008) can't make readers forget his highly public literary lows, he proves he can dynamically reimagine his past into a page-turner, in his signature stream-of-consciousness style.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Frey (A Million Little Pieces) crafts an underwhelming fictionalized memoir that follows Jay, a young American writer living in Paris and Los Angeles who is determined to write books that will "burn the world down." The narrative jumps between 1992 Paris and 2017 Los Angeles-the 15 years in between, in which Jay achieves his dream of becoming a famous writer, pass unexamined. Looking back on his time in Paris, Jay considers his early ambitions and the love affair that informed his best work. After receiving a Facebook message from his former lover, Jay begins to recollect his debaucherous years in Paris in a series of vignettes that read like poor imitations of Henry Miller, rendered in choppy, disjointed prose that readers of Frey's earlier works will recognize. They may also recognize versions of high-profile incidents from Frey's life when they occur in the novel, such as Jay appearing on a talk show to defend himself after the host accuses him of lying about his first book. While the narrative hinges on Jay's thoughts about writing a great book, it does little to convince the reader that Jay is actually a talented writer. This quixotic novel might make some readers reconsider Frey's legacy, but the story itself will leave most wanting. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The controversy surrounding Frey's A Million Little Pieces obscured the striking work he does, as evidenced by his new novel, not a memoir but driven by Frey's experience as a writer. In propulsive, shattering prose, the narrative moves primarily between 2017 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris as a successful but emotionally end-of-his-rope author is thrown back to his raucous, raunchy, revelatory, hopeful young days in the City of Light and his affair with the heart-stopping Katerina. Carousing as much as he's writing, brazenly determined to produce something that "burn[s] the fucking world down," Jay is sitting in front of Auguste Rodin's The Gates of Hell when he's accosted by a tart, imperturbable woman in a skull-covered dress, and despite his initial rude resistance he falls passionately in love. Their affair and its lasting consequences are told mostly in a cascade of fractured, one-liners-whether exchange, interior monolog, or, later, email-resulting in an immediacy of content without the weight of backstory. The ending could have been maudlin, but it's not. VERDICT Structurally distinctive, this sensual eye-opener is about the act of creation, and it will prove fascinating reading even for those still mad at Frey. [See Prepub Alert, 4/8/18.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Having kept busy plowing the fields of children's lit, writer and literary industrialist Frey (My Friend Leonard, 2005, etc.) delivers his first adult book in a decade.Jay is a callous young man, a 21-year-old expat in Paris who is resisting a mapped-out future in which he'll be "An obedient cog locked in fucking place forever." A quarter-century later, he's locked in place in Los Angeles as a bestselling writerwriters, after all, don't write about unhappy sea captains these days, not when one of their own ilk is available for dissectionwhose agent is 10 years his junior and wears a $5,000 suit. What's to be preferred, a youth of drug-dealing poverty in the City of Lights or a gilded prison in the City of Angels? Easy: When you factor in a torrid season of love with a hot young model then being a cash-strapped kid is infinitely better. Frey takes his presumed alter ego back and forth across the decades, whining and moping and self-medicating ("I played ball and read books and chased girls and got drunk and snorted cocaine")and, in his later years, lamenting roads taken and not taken and wishing he had figured out how to do better by the title character. So far, so good; it's all the stuff of an Ethan Hawke movie, and there's not a surprising moment in it. What does surprise, perhaps, are Frey's spasms of high-toned porn, of which perhaps the most-printable-in-a-family-publication passage is something like this: "We both move toward each other kissing deeply slowly heavily, lips and tongues, her hands are immediately in my pants, I lift her off the ground set her on the sink tear off her thong." James Joyce it ain't, and though it's marginally more literate than E.L. James, it's nothing the aforementioned Mr. Hawke couldn't pull off on screen and behind the keyboard.A long-anticipated return that many readers will decide wasn't worth the wait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
