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Summary
Summary
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning comes Katerina , James Frey's highly anticipated new novel set in 1992 Paris and contemporary Los Angeles.
A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina , the explosive new novel by America's most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018.
At its center are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years later, the writer is rich, famous, and numb, and he wants to drive his car into a tree, when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years prior. Written in the same percussive, propulsive, dazzling, breathtaking style as A Million Little Pieces , Katerina echoes and complements that most controversial of memoirs, and plays with the same issues of fiction and reality that created, nearly destroyed, and then recreated James Frey in the American imagination.
Author Notes
James Frey was born on September 12, 1969. He graduated from Denison University in 1992. He eventually moved to Los Angeles and found work as a screenwriter, director, and producer. He wrote the screenplays to the films Kissing a Fool and Sugar: The Fall of the West, which he also directed.
He is an American author who was thrust into the spotlight after he published his "autobiographical" book, A Million Little Pieces in 2003. By 2006 it became common knowledge that parts of the memoir were fictitious. This lead Frey and his publisher to a public confrontation on the Oprah show. After admitting that he had made parts of the book up, a note was published in future editions of the book to that effect. Also, readers who felt that they were "defrauded" and who bought the book prior to the 2006 date were offered a refund by Random House.
His other books include My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. In 2009 he formed a young adult publishing company, Full Fathom Five, which wrote the novels I Am Number Four and The Power of Six under the name of Pittacus Lore. I Am Number Four was made into a movie in 2011. Frey's title, The Calling, co-authored with Nils Johnson-Shelton, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
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.
Guardian Review
US author's 'fictional retelling' of a Paris love affair is the winner from all-male shortlist Years after gaining notoriety for embellishing parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, the US author James Frey has a new notch in his bedpost: the 2018 bad sex in fiction award. Seeing off competition from an all-male shortlist that included Haruki Murakami and the Man Booker prize-nominated Gerard Woodward, Frey won for his novel Katerina, a "fictional retelling" of a love affair the author started while on a hedonistic trip to France in the 1990s. The story follows Jay, a young American would-be writer, as he drinks and bonks his way around Paris, particularly with a Norwegian model named Katerina. The award's judges at the Literary Review said they had been swayed by several sex scenes in the novel, which include encounters in a car park and in the back of a taxi, but were especially convinced by an extended scene in a Paris bathroom between Jay and Katerina that features eight references to ejaculate. "Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we're both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one," Frey writes. "One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I'm still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other's eyes, she smiles." After "days of debate", the judges decided to give the dubious honour to Frey because "the Norwegian model left them unconvinced and the hard withdrawal was too much for them to bear". The judges said: "Frey prevailed against a strong all-male shortlist by virtue of the sheer number and length of dubious erotic passages in his book. The multiple scenes of sustained fantasy in Katerina could have won Frey the award many times over." Responding to his win, the author said: "I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Kudos to all my distinguished fellow finalists - you have all provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading over the last year." Frey, who shot to fame with his 2004 memoir about his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces, and later became even more famous when the book was proved to contain embellishments, has been nominated for the bad sex award before, in 2011 for his novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. Among the other shortlisted titles this year were Murakami's Killing Commendatore ("I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter"); Woodward for The Paper Lovers ("Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready"); and Scoundrels by Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan ("Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her"). Previous winners of the prize include Giles Coren, Morrissey and Norman Mailer. Coren, who described male genitalia "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath", acknowledged his win with good humour, announcing of the shortlist: "I wish I'd written them all." However, many authors have refused to collect their award, including Morrissey, who called the prize "evil", and the late Tom Wolfe, who won for a passage in I Am Charlotte Simmons that included the line "slither slither slither slither went the tongue". "There's an old saying: 'You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her sing,'" Wolfe told Reuters at the time. "In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can't make him get it." The award, which aims to "draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction", was presented in Frey's absence by the singer Kim Wilde at London's In and Out club. In the award's 25-year history, only three women - Rachel Johnson, Nancy Huston and Wendy Perriam - have won. But the Literary Review's Frank Brinkley would not "officially" admit that women wrote better sex scenes than men. "There has been some great bad sex from women in the past but this year men are the prime offenders," he told the Guardian. "There were a couple of women on the nominal longlist, which we don't publish, but we decided they weren't bad enough." - Sian Cain.
Kirkus 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.
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
New York Review of Books 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."
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.
