I've been reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. It's fucking good literature, and after having to force myself through reading David Eggars, it's nice to know that there are other voices sprouting. Literature seems to be a game for people who've attained a certain level of experience. You just don't see many people under 25 who are published and good. Though there are plenty of sub-25ers who can certainly write, there aren't many -- it seems -- who can write whole books. Some of this probably has to do with market forces, but I digress.

Anyway, I like James Frey's book and I didn't like Eggars's. I just finished You Shall Know Our Velocity and it bothers me that anyone would like that book. I contains little wisdom in my estimation, and the fact that anyone has ever compared it to On the Road is deeply and personally offensive. I've heard that Eggars had to battle with publishers, cut hundreds of pages, and that the "real" book is much better. Maybe that's true; maybe it's PR. I don't really care. It's not the author who I find disturbing; Eggars seems at worst to be a well-intentioned egomaniac with an undeniable gift for language, at best a struggling young author with some sense of social responsibility. In either case, he's fine. What I find disturbing is that there are people who read the same book that I did, and who really enjoyed it.

It disturbs me because I disliked 90% of the book. I disliked the characters, failed to empathize. Were I to meet these people in real life I wouldn't think so much of them. It distrubs me to think that either A) skilled rhetorical flourishes (which Eggars provides in quantity) are all that people notice about literature, or that B) other people really felt for these characters. It disturbs me and leads me to question my own grasp of the America Cultural Moment.

I find emotional immaturity and postmodern self-awareness to be generally annoying and generally my two least favorite personality facits of my supposed peer group. I have a spiritual kind of hatred for the kind of peevish inhibition which Eggars's characters wallow in. I also have little patience for reflexive emotional skirt-holding; for people who can't buck the fuck up and live. There are great moments and good sentences in that book, but there's nothing I would call substance. There might be a real attempt to grapple with Everything, but if there is -- and it's not just a bunch of intellectual razzle-dazzle -- it's a failure. And so it worries me that people might think the book is wise, or even entertaining.

James Frey, on the other hand, is my kind of person. I would like to shake his hand and talk about philosophy and the human condition over many cups of coffee. His writing is stylistically adventurous (no quotation marks), but that's fucking irrellivant. What's relevant is that he knows how to write in a way that grips your mind and heart. What's relevant is that he has a vision for comedy and tragedy and understands something about the soul and what makes people tick; reminds me of Irvine Welsh at his best. His character -- himself at 23, no doubt in some ways filtered through hindsight -- is a character I can not only empathize with, but strongly admire to boot. The other people in the book, even the incidental ones, are all rendered full and lifelike. The situations, though far outside me realm of experience, are engaging and the story (the story!) carries me along as a reader the way a story aught to. It engaged my imagination and intelect and emotional vocabulary and made me really want to know what happens next. It is a book which I stayed up too late reading more than a couple times. I am sad that it is over. I strongly recommend it.