James Frey’s sensual ‘Katerina’ goes astray
“Do you ever think of me?” “Maybe.”
“I think of you every day.” “Good.”
“Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not.” James Frey’s new novel, “Katerina” (Scout Press, 306 pp., ★★g☆), begins with anonymous texting, a voice from the past, setting into motion a cinematic plot that straddles 25 years. Taking place, alternatively, between 2017 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris, this is a love story gone awry, a coming-of-age tale that ages before your very eyes into a troubling midlife crisis.
The protagonist, Jay, is 21 when he reads Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and is inspired to write the Great Amer- ican Novel that will “burn the world down.”
Jay leaves his college sweetie, quits school, sells cocaine to bankroll his habit and literary fantasy, goes to Paris and succumbs to an edgy, artsy, debauched lifestyle. When he falls madly for a young, beautiful, red-haired fashion model from Oslo, Norway, named Katerina, things get better – and then they don’t.
Fast-forward to Los Angeles 25 years later. Fortysomething wearily successful writer Jay hates himself and his life. It’s everything his faux-bohemian self once vowed it would never become – wife, two kids, three cars, housekeeper.
His literary agent, who wears a
$5,000 suit and a $50,000 Rolex, reminds Jay that he was once the “most famous writer in the world.” Jay’s breakthrough best-selling book was famous for being one of the biggest literary frauds ever. Delusional Jay believes it “burnt down the world.”
Meanwhile, the anonymous texting turns flirtatious, intimate. Could it be Katerina?
But what begins as a promising whatif story turns into an autobiographical novel, with Frey blurring fact and fiction, creating Jay in his own image.
No worries, since “Katerina” is a novel. That wasn’t the case when Frey was outed and ostracized (including a famous tongue-lashing from Oprah Winfrey) for fictionalizing and exaggerating substantial pieces of his best-selling
2003 addiction memoir “A Million Little Pieces” (now a movie starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Charlie Hunnam).
Freed to fabricate, Frey gets some things right in “Katerina.” But his frenzied style causes plotus interruptus. Frey fans might love it, but his streamof-consciousness disjointed prose wears you down. And the f-bombs are so excessive that readers who initially might be offended by the obscenity eventually will be more offended by the redundancy. Did we mention way too many graphic sex scenes? The drunken Jay vomiting moments?
In the end, “Katerina” reads like Frey’s latest foray into himself, even something of mea culpa for the memoir that earned him infamy and fortune. It has all the right elements: love, sex, heartbreak, regret, Paris, L.A. But good? Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not.