Hold for laughter

• James Frey's next book will have a Biblical slant.

Maybe I'm not giving him a fair shake... but...

James Frey is moving on from his drugs and booze-soaked memoirs to write the third book of the Bible, in which his version of Jesus will perform gay marriages.

Talking to online magazine The Rumpus.net, Frey said he had just finished an outline for the book, and was about to start writing it. "It's the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," he told interviewer and fellow author Stephen Elliott. "My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?"

No, really, it's fiction this time

• James Frey's third novel is coming out in summer 2008 from HarperCollins.

Okay, he shouldn't have lied. Okay? Now we can let the rest of his work speak for itself.

"It has great emotional power," said Jonathan Burnham, who added that he had befriended Frey a year ago and had known of the new book for several months.

A HarperCollins publicist said there would be no comment from Frey, whose career was seemingly finished a year ago after allegations emerged that he had embellished, or entirely invented, substantial portions of "A Million Little Pieces."

Save the fiction for the page

Writers are born liars. When you start stringing words together, the tide-pull of creativity can carry you off just as easily as one blinks an eye. It is all about destroying the world and rebuilding it as you wish. The headlines have been filled of late with writers who’ve been busted for crossing the line: Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, James Frey. Now it’s JT LeRoy, who, as it turns out, doesn’t exist at all; it was a pen name for former partners Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop, with LeRoy portrayed in public, under a wig and dark sunglasses, by Knoop’s half-sister Samantha, and various other unnamed “stand-ins.”

What’s amazing about this particular hoax is that it went on for so long; the ruse started in 1996, and by January of this year, LeRoy’s name graced the covers of three novels, one of which, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, was adapted for the screen in 2001 by writer-director Asia Argento (daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario). According to Wikipedia, pieces under LeRoy’s name have been published in American Zoetrope, McSweeney's, Memorious, and Oxford American magazine's 7th Annual Music Issue; this in addition to LeRoy’s editorial contributions to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 and MTV's Lit Riffs, among others. Those are just the highlights.

You gotta hand it to them, really -- they got a lot of mileage out of the lie. But it’s still a lie. The publishing industry is, of course, shocked, shocked that someone might deceive them, but apparently they easily forget that fiction is a writer’s stock in trade. Granted, journalists like Glass and Blair are more of a problem than Frey and LeRoy; journalists are supposed to walk that higher path, to hew to the truth, no matter how hard it is to wrestle it into the framework of the story you wish to tell. LeRoy’s backstory was the thing that sold people on the writing; the same with Frey. When it comes out that the backstory is embellished or invented altogether, it puts the work in a different light. But the work is inanimate; it has no feelings to hurt and no blood to draw. There’s no immediate, primal satisfaction in attacking the work, because going after the creator is so much more viciously satisfying.

A compelling, well-told story, no matter how outlandish, creates believers. People want something to believe in; they look to creative thinkers of every stripe for leadership and guidance, to ease the pain of being alive, and when it’s perceived that they’ve failed us in some way, anger makes them forget that it was just a simple story, about people trying to make it through a day in a complicated, brutal and unfair world. Albert and Knoop shouldn’t have misled people the way they did, but history overflows with many such deceptions, however altruistic their intent, which many still place great faith in. So it goes.

Lawsuits, interviews and another publication's demise

• A Turkish judge has dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk caused a ruckus a while back by classifying the wholesale slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as well as of Kurds in the 1980s, as genocide, an opinion that the Turkish public was apparently not ready to accept. The charge against Pamuk was that he “insulted Turkish identity.” It’s a good thing the judge found a handy legal loophole to use as an escape chute; it saved the government from having to address the fact that they’re trying to suppress alternative viewpoints.

• Donald Trump is suing New York Times business reporter Timothy O’Brien.

O’Brien, as well as Time Warner Book Group and Warner Books, have the lawyer-hounds at their heels because O’Brien’s new book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, quotes anonymous sources that allege Trump isn’t nearly as wealthy as he says he is. I got five bucks saying they’ll call each other names and point fingers and eventually settle out of court for some absurd undisclosed amount.

• Video: Bill Maher interviews Stephen King at Amazon.com.

For a strange new experience, watch Bill Maher interview Stephen King via Amazon’s new online video program, Amazon Fishbowl (a.k.a., “All We Really Want Is To Be The Home Shopping Network”). The interview starts out with the usual softball questions, but quickly gets interesting once Maher brings up James Frey and lets King, a former user/abuser himself, express his total lack of surprise that a drug addict might make a few things up. It’s too bad they both look like corporate shills in the process.

• Charles McGrath details the closing of The New Leader in the New York Times.

Another one bites the dust:

Over the years The New Leader attracted a band of loyal contributors who amounted to a not-so-short list of everyone who was anyone in liberal intellectual circles: George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Willy Brandt, Albert Murray, Hubert H. Humphrey, Theodore Draper, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, Murray Kempton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Hans J. Morgenthau, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name just a few. All of them wrote for nothing, or in recent years for what Mr. Kolatch calls a "tangible token" of $100 or so. The sociologist Daniel Bell, whose connection to the magazine is perhaps the longest of anyone's, dating back to when he was a student at City College in the late 30's, said recently, "When you think about it, it's remarkable that The New Leader was able to sustain itself for so long."

Two obligatory cents on James Frey

This whole James Frey thing is crazy. Craziest of all is Random House’s offering refunds to people who are so incensed over The Smoking Gun’s accusations that they want their money back; that’s an extremely reactionary position to take. No one kvetched at MGM when Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine was proved to have played fast and loose with the facts... and he still has a Best Documentary Oscar to show for it.

Two camps have formed over this, with both arguing over what the definition of a “memoir” entails. One, espoused by Frey’s publishers and The Oprah herself, is that a memoir is naturally subject to embellishment, invention and/or reinterpretation of past events, and that A Million Little Pieces’ strength lies in its depiction of overcoming substance addiction and its message of redemption. The opposing camp argues that a memoirist is duty-bound to be as factual and objective as any journalist is. Nicholas Christopher, for example, told the AP that “he was troubled by the view, advanced by some, that readers ‘expect’ facts to be occasionally distorted in a memoir. ‘Yes, we do that sometimes — it's called a novel,’ he said.”

Oprah’s probably the real target here. In all likelihood, Frey dashed off this heavily fictionalized take on his struggles with addiction without ever actually believing anyone would ever read it. Then, of course, the thing takes off like a rocket and he has to cover his ass. I doubt the brouhaha would have been this intense if it didn’t have one of those book-club logos plastered on the front cover. Winfrey’s book club has engendered a hell of a lot of bad blood in the literary community, and many of the attacks on Frey have taken on the distinct tone of opportunism. They’re going after Frey for misrepresenting himself, sure, but Her Oprahness is whose head they’re really jonesing for.

But while we’re on the subject of defining what is or is not permissible in a particular form of writing, let’s take a look at the report which started it all. The Smoking Gun has long been a highly opinionated muckracking online publication that’s barely a step or two above a supermarket tabloid; they report celebrity arrests and things of that nature with the same salacious breathlessness. To start with, many of their “revelations” take on the uncomfortable form of character assassination. If journalism is supposed to be fair, balanced and objective, the investigative report fails consistently; Frey is a target and they don't pretend otherwise. There’s a tremendous amount of valuable investigative reporting in the piece, yes, but more often than not it tends to be cloaked in the dogmatic verbiage of gossip columns, with nary a single individual willing to be credited with authorship for the piece to begin with.

Here’s another thing that’s absolutely true: You cannot trust a drug addict. The Frey mess reminds me of that bit from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where good old Dr. Gonzo says that you can turn your back on a friend, but you can never turn your back on a drug. An addictive personality still has the same craving for attention and reassurance, regardless of whether or not they’re using; they’ll shuck, jive and lie their asses off for the rest of their days, because the itch never goes away. They’ll charm you and tell you what you want to hear, because that’s what they do. I can’t begrudge anyone for feeling a little cheated by Frey’s admissions, and, truthfully, his magnanimous posturing as a poster boy for redemption often seems disingenuous. But that’s the problem when you try to separate the man from the message; more often than not, you end up with two different and contradictory things. Such is life.

Language, longevity and book clubs

• Natalie Angier sniffs around the notion of “dirty words” at the New York Times.

The notion of language being obscene and/or disgusting became utterly irrelevant to me the first time I ever saw what a bullet did to a living thing. Of course, if you torture and/or kill in the name of your country or your god, you’re in the clear. Humanity baffles me.

• Carlos Fuentes fetes Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its influence on the literary form known as the novel.

I’ll be glad when Quixote’s 400th anniversary year is over so I can get back to enjoying the book again. The problem with something like Quixote is not that it’s overrated, per se, but that it sometimes doesn’t quite bear the weight of all the innovations it’s supposed to have ushered into existence. Nonetheless, Fuentes makes a number of good points about a novel’s shelf life, and how it can live far beyond its creator’s expectations.

• Slate’s Fall Fiction Week closes out with Meghan O’Rourke’s adventures in unraveling The Sound and the Fury, with a little help from a certain book-loving talk-show host.

Either you go with Faulkner, or you don’t. Read this piece either way; O’Rourke’s take on him is insightful and practical. Oprah’s book club choices have been hit-and-miss with me -- most of the ones I’ve read, like Midwives, The Reader, Ellen Foster and House of Sand and Fog, didn’t add up to much -- so I have to give her credit for going with a trifecta of modernist classics that require a bit more effort to get through. But I daresay I kinda preferred it when she was introducing new authors to the scene. So much for that... thanks a lot, Franzen.

(Update, 9/22/05: The new book club selection from The Oprah is James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces. Ehhh... fine.)