James Frey’s New Novel, “Subsequent to Heaven” Is as Unhealthy as It Sounds
The creator web page of “Subsequent to Heaven,” James Frey’s new novel, breathlessly notes that Frey “was known as America’s Most Infamous Writer by Time Journal and the Unhealthy Boy of American Literature by The New York Occasions.” The copy doesn’t focus on the place this repute got here from—cigarettes? Bikes? You think about Frey holding up a liquor retailer whereas delivering some close-to-the-bone fact about modern life that nobody needs to confess.
However, after all, Frey’s offense was much less glamorous than that. In 2006, he acquired caught for having fabricated elements of his habit memoir, “A Million Little Items,” within the hopes of constructing his life appear extra cinematic and intense. (In that respect, at the very least, the supply of his infamy—a bent to self-mythologize—will be discovered on his new creator web page.) Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Items” for her e-book membership, dressed Frey down on nationwide tv. He stored writing however largely withdrew from the general public eye for a few a long time, amassing a fortune because the founding father of a book-packaging outfit, after which because the C.E.O. of a video-game firm. Now Frey has rebranded himself as an early sufferer of cancel tradition and seeks redemption in a media setting that he believes has lastly caught as much as him and his adventures on the post-truth frontier.
Frey in comeback mode continues to blur the road between fantasy and actuality, however he’s additionally realized from his expertise. “Subsequent to Heaven” is being marketed as fiction, at the same time as Frey has teased that different persons are saying that elements of it are drawn from his life in New Canaan, Connecticut. “I used to be working in autofiction earlier than that phrase existed,” he advised the Occasions, in a prolonged profile. To Vainness Honest, he stated, “If I’m revealed as memoir or nonfiction, all people goes by way of it and tries to determine what’s not true. And if I publish it as fiction, all people goes by way of it and tries to determine what’s. I sit within the center and say, ‘I wrote a e-book. I hope you dig it.’ ”
Is “Subsequent to Heaven” autofiction? No, it’s a straightforwardly plotted thriller a couple of group of stratospherically rich finance varieties and their wives behaving badly within the fictional city of New Bethlehem, “as stunning and protected and excellent a city as exists anyplace on this planet.” Is it, for lack of a greater time period, cancelled-guy fiction, animated by resentment at being misunderstood? That’s a harder name. Frey wasn’t cancelled for abusing ladies or being a intercourse pest—only for embellishing his life—however he seems to establish with the #MeToo discontents and to have adopted the gender politics and postures of that tribe. So the e-book is provocative in a well-recognized approach. “She didn’t prefer to admit it, as a result of in as we speak’s world ladies had been presupposed to be formidable and wish careers, to be feminists, and to wish to be robust and impartial, however all she ever wished, her life’s nice dream, was to be a spouse and to be a mom,” he writes. Additionally: “He could be an AFL, an Asskicker for Life. A Nice White Shark. A Silverback. An Alpha amongst Alphas. No one would ever fuck with him.”
The plot facilities on a swingers’ occasion organized by Devon, the bored and “stunningly beautiful” spouse of a bullying hedge-fund titan, and her buddy Belle, a “Texas debutante” whose husband, often known as the Nearer for his prowess in personal fairness, is battling erectile dysfunction. The soirée units off a sequence of additional intrigues and, towards the tip of the novel, Alex, a former soccer star who is just too ashamed to inform his spouse that he has misplaced his buying and selling job, is found on his sofa along with his pants down and a plastic bag duct-taped over his face. Frey, who likes to belabor his factors till the carcass of the horse has really disintegrated, writes:
I’ve wrestled with a Frey-like dread by way of the writing of this evaluation—I’m afraid that I’ll describe his e-book and nobody will consider me. The 2 primary characters, Devon and her husband, Billy, are a swarm of standing signifiers stuffed ungrammatically right into a Burberry trench coat. Billy “had gone to Exeter on a full trip and graduated at sixteen. From there he went to the Wharton joint undergrad/MBA program on a full trip and graduated at twenty. He instantly went to work at Goldman, who had began recruiting him when he was seventeen, and have become the second-youngest companion within the financial institution’s historical past at twenty-four. At twenty-five, he was making twenty million {dollars} a 12 months. He left Goldman at twenty-eight and began his personal hedge fund. It was a spectacular success. . . .” In the meantime, Devon “had grown up in Greenwich on an property known as Willowvale. . . . Devon’s ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower. . . . She had gone to Greenwich Academy, the most effective women’ colleges within the nation, for nursery, elementary, and center faculty. After GA, she went to boarding faculty at Miss Porter’s, whose notable alumnae embrace Laura Rockefeller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lilly Pulitzer, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Agnes Gund. After Porter’s, she went to Princeton and was a member of The Ivy, its most prestigious eating membership. . . .”
The entire e-book is like this. On the partitions of Billy and Devon’s home are “work by Picasso, Warhol, Lichtenstein, De Kooning, Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Basquiat, Cecily Brown, Mark Grotjahn.” Their home has “a movie show. A house fitness center. A yoga studio . . . a sport room full of classic video video games and pinball machines . . . ” In her lavatory, replete with “black-veined Calacatta marble counters,” Devon applies “La Prairie and Orogold lotions and wonder merchandise, Azature nail polish, Jean Patou Pleasure fragrance,” and her “pale-pink Chanel spaghetti-strap gown” hangs on “her taut physique, pores and skin tender and tan and glowing, sun-streaked hair falling over her shoulders, deep shining blue eyes offset by the gown and the pores and skin and hair.” Frey named Bret Easton Ellis as one among his inspirations for “Subsequent to Heaven,” and absolutely the collapse of foreground and background right here is intentional. The lady, the counter tops, the garments, and the jewels are all one fetish object, one undifferentiated fantasy.
To offer credit score to Frey the place it’s due, his prose will be endearingly excitable. On the swingers’ soirée, he writes, “Dialog was flowing, everybody was awed by the home, by the land, by how the home and the land existed collectively, complimented one another, danced and sang and laughed with one another.” Simply as usually, although, he will get too excited. His evocation of a lady’s grief sounds prefer it was ripped from a B.D.S.M. personals advert: “Most warmth. Most ache. Most impression.” Single-sentence paragraphs, at their worst, counsel that he’s experiencing a sort of cognitive paper jam. The preparations for the intercourse occasion are recounted in lascivious element. We’re apprised of a care bundle delivered to every room, a black field “lined with black satin” and containing “condoms in a number of sizes, lube in a number of flavors, a small vibrator, a bigger one, a blindfold, restraints for the wrists, restraints for the ankles.” Frey spends pages on his characters’ anticipation of the large evening, particularly the wives’. As with the countless descriptions of luxurious items and social-professional triumphs, the e-book can appear to lose itself in prolonging a fantasy that doesn’t embrace the reader.
It’s tempting to think about that the creator’s caressing remedy of a lot wealth and hotness and success is, the truth is, a slap. Possibly Frey is mocking materialism? But when strains like “They acquired married on the Dallas Nation Membership in entrance of eight hundred company in what Texas journal known as the Wedding ceremony of the Decade” are meant critically, it’s laborious to know what, precisely, they’re criticizing. Does Frey intend to take goal on the vacancy of cash and standing as metrics for the nice life, for human flourishing? If that’s the case, the e-book’s obsession with area of interest signifiers is so excessive that he appears to be focusing on nobody however himself. Likewise, the intensely retrograde gender politics—and the textual content’s out-of-control, onanistic eroticism—appear pretty private and particular. As satire, “Subsequent to Heaven” is unintelligible, as if somebody is universalizing their very own hangups after which skewering them for clout.
