Book Review: A Million Little Pieces

The book club selection for August was the controversial best-seller by James Frey. Chosen by Oprah when it was first published, this boosted the semi-autobiographical story of a young man addicted to just about everything to the top of the best seller lists. Trouble was Oprah, and millions of other readers, didn't realise it was semi-autobiographical. Frey had embellished certain parts of the text to make the memoir more... poignant? Interesting? Dunno, but those linear Yanks didn't like it. They'd swallowed it as the gospel truth of Frey's life and felt cheated when they found out parts of it hadn't happened. Or at least hadn't happened exactly as they're depicted in the book.

Online commentaries I've read since beginning the book suggest that Europeans in general, and Brits in particular, don't have as much of a problem with this. I certainly didn't. I read the book for what it is (it may have helped that my copy is a later print run, which includes the author's explanation of why he changed some things around), and I can't say anything about it except that I was blown away. Not a phrase I use often, or lightly. I was blown away.

Frey breaks just about every rule ever written on novel writing. Or even use of English. He dispenses with quotation marks. Speech appears in the text just like exposition. The only clue to who's talking is if the speakers call each other by name, or in what they say, or very occasionally in the way they say it. This is disconcerting at first, but soon becomes entirely natural.

He almost dispenses with commas too. His first person narrative is more stream of consciousness than narration. I did this and I did that and I did the other. Sometimes even the 'ands' are omitted. Also, reflecting his extreme addiction and mental disarray at the start of the story, he frequently repeats things. Not only for emphasis or effect, but because it's the way he was thinking at the time. And although this initially looks, sounds and feels like a barrier to understanding, it too becomes natural. Surprisingly quickly. It reads like thought. A strange experience at first, but brilliantly executed so that within a few pages you don't even notice. It's like being inside his head.

Frey says that if the novel had been submitted as a piece of work to a grade class or a writing group, or on a degree course, it would have been thrown out. So many rules have been broken. So different is it from what we expect from a novel, or a memoir. Thank God for agents and editors with vision. For this is undoubtedly one of the most moving, involving and ultimately fulfilling books I've ever read. It's quite common for me to shed a quiet tear when I'm reading a well-written story. Sometimes it's just a pricking of the eyes, sometimes a welling up, sometimes the tear rolls down the cheek. This is, after all, the effect an author aims for. If you can't move your audience, what are you doing writing at all?

That said, never before has a book made me quite literally sob out loud. Uncontrollably. I can't explain what it was that struck such a deep chord with me. I am not now nor have I ever been addicted to any substance. I don't smoke. I drink the odd beer, glass of wine or gin & tonic at weekends. I have never done drugs of any kind. Chocolate is the nearest thing I could claim to be addicted to, and then only as a joke. And yet through the force of his writing I identified so closely with Frey's predicament and his journey from a wreck on the very edge of death to a man facing his future with strength and hope, that I was moved beyond any work I have ever encountered.

I will be giving this a 10 tonight. Only the second time in almost 30 months that I have awarded full marks. In this case, if I could give more, I would.