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Remember James Frey? Of course you do. The author of A Million Little Pieces, the famously fictional addiction memoir, whose credibility was destroyed, who was shamed in front of millions by Oprah. "Emotional truth," it turned out, was not enough.

People demanded their money back. Some even sued. As Frey admits, it was a very bad year.

The upside of the whole thing, though, was that he made a lot of money. A whole lot. His book stayed on bestseller lists through the scandal and beyond, making him a household name, albeit one associated with duplicity and shame.

Frey's a survivor, though (that part of the memoir, it turns out, was not made up), and he's managed to parlay his fame/notoriety into another book deal. His new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, is not about him, but rather, about several fictional denizens of Los Angeles. From the noble bum who lives in a bathroom on Venice Beach, to the two teenagers in love from the Tom Petty song (or was it a Steve Miller song?) attracted to the bright lights of the big city, to the Hollywood power couple with terrible (but fairly predictable) secrets, Frey intersperses their stories with anecdotes about the City of Angels, as he attempts to lay the metropolis bare before our eyes.

Bright Shiny Morning has echoes of the first two books in both its style and content. Its long, austere sentences are short on punctuation. Its characters are familiar and not terribly complicated, their actions predictable to anyone who's ever watched a Hollywood movie or read a drugstore paperback (as one reviewer pointed out its only Mexican American character is a maid.) It doesn't, however, break any new ground, or do much to justify its 500-plus pages.

In her glowing review of the book in The New York Times, erstwhile Frey-decrier Janet Maslin notes of the book's tired characters and situations, "Not so original, so what? So what if the book always made poor people humble, decent, better than rich spoiled profligate ones?" So what? So this: the reason we read books is to learn things we didn't know, see things we've never seen before, or things we have seen before in a way we've never seen them.

The Times ran another review, written by novelist Walter Kirn, who, with more than a trace of jealous bitchiness, does Frey no such favors. He compares Frey's factoids to Wikipedia entries, his descriptions of people and settings to pages from Zagat's. "[Frey's] point is not new, nor is this manner of making it, but the least one can ask of a writer who can't resist is that he maintain some sense of timing and showmanship — that he keep his act snappy since it can't be fresh."

There were more reviews, some good, most bad (David Ulin's in the LA Times starts out, "Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read.") and lots of press. The book is selling, not as well as the last ones, but it's doing alright.

Way back when, Frey tried to sell his memoirs as fiction, and when he was rebuffed, rewrote them as fact. This explains the all-too-perfect harlequin quality of some of the scenes and the story. There were times reading it when I thought to myself, this is just a bit much, isn't it? But I went along with it, carried by the run-on sentences, enjoying the narrative, wanting to believe. I think that was pretty common. As fiction, though, it sucked. And I think that was as much the problem as anything.