There’s more to this bad fiction than bad sex – between the lines is privilege
When in competition with a book that likens a vagina to a “enamelled pepper mill”, perhaps one doesn’t expect to win the Bad Sex in Fiction award – yet this is where James Frey finds himself, having won on Monday night for his novel Katerina. Given the critical response to Katerina, it might be the only prize the book will win. In his review for the Observer, Alexander Larman called it “an unappealing and old-fashioned wallow in glorifying empty masculine privilege”, while the Washington Post, rather kindly, declared it “the worst novel of the year”. It might actually be the worst novel of the decade.
Frey gained literary infamy in the early 2000s when details in his addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces were found to be embellished. But all the op-eds in the world and even a squirming television appearance with an angry Oprah Winfrey, who had picked it for her book club, did not end Frey’s career. He’d arrived at the perfect time: when authenticity was more about the truth behind feelings rather than facts, when the now-accepted genres “auto-fiction” and “creative nonfiction” were blooming, and when our ideas of subjectivity were being shaken by an explosion of “reality” television. To this day A Million Little Pieces is marketed as memoir, albeit with an insouciant caveat from Frey that not all of it is true, and he continues to write novels including Katerina, which he describes in a foreword as a “fictional retelling” of a real love affair he had as a young man in Paris in the 1990s.
In Katerina, Frey’s gaze is firmly aimed lower than his navel. One of the many drug-fuelled sex scenes in the book, all with beautiful women with unending appetites for exhibitionism and drunk narcissists, is described thusly: “we fuck on the floor do more fuck in the bed do more fuck in the shower do more take a bath and play with each other do more go for a walk through the ground of the hotel into a vineyard find a ridge and sit and watch the sun rise we walk back to the hotel and fuck again in the bed we fuck again.”
But Jay is a thinker, too. “When I sit down to read, I take it seriously … it’s sex and love and the smell of cum,” he states – and he definitely thinks a
lot about all three of those things as he drinks, bonks and vomits his way around Paris.
This is not another review of a rubbish book, but rather a dissection of why Katerina exists at all. How did Frey come to plonk Katerina in front of publishers, who, we should assume, can string two words together (Katerina contains sentences such as “Cum. Cum. Cum”), and who decided it should be read by the world? Publishing, like Hollywood or the music industry, is not above endorsing mediocrity over meritocracy. This is why it is so hard to believe publishers when they say they are committed to improving diversity: yes, we are getting brilliant books from new voices such as Guy Gunaratne or Sally Rooney, and yes, a few of them now have promising diversity initiatives, but then we also get books such as Sean Penn’s Bob Honey Just Do Stuff (“She sharted agave shimmering spirits and shifted shit-faced overboard”) and Frey’s Katerina.
For all the uplifting public statements about searching for “new voices”, publishers still publish books that only white, famous men such as Frey can write, while Nikesh Shukla had to crowdfund the bestselling essay collection The Good Immigrant, and Matt Cain went to Unbound to publish a novel turned down by other publishers for being “too gay”. The day someone young, black or unknown publishes something as bad as Katerina, I’ll sing L’Internationale.
This year I interviewed Hank Green, a YouTuber who has written his first book in the wake of the very successful writing career of his older brother, John Green. Hank sidestepped my rather delicate question on this order of events to say, with refreshing honesty: “I knew even if it was a bad book, someone would publish it.” He was right – there was no way publishers would pass on another Green. But that doesn’t make any of it right.
Perhaps this is why, so often, the