Hypervigilance and James Frey

Hope you saved the receipt. Readers who pur­chased James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces before its pub­lisher, Random House, admit­ted that it was fic­ti­tious will be eli­gi­ble for a full refund.

As reported on Radaronline.com:

The refund is in response to a class-action law­suit brought by read­ers in sev­eral states who claimed they were vic­tims of fraud.

According to the New York Times, to be eli­gi­ble for the refund, read­ers must sub­mit a dated proof of pur­chase that shows they pur­chased the book on or before Jan. 26, 2006. Hardcover claimants must sub­mit page 163 of their copy, while paper­back buy­ers must hand over the front cover (there are other specs for audio­books and other formats).

Here’s the kicker:

The to-do over Frey’s book has been blown com­pletely out of pro­por­tion, and as the first quote says, it is set­ting up a dan­ger­ously con­strained and struc­tural­ist view of gen­res of literature.

Part of the prob­lems comes from reader naivete. Your gen­eral reader of books is not a trained lit­er­ary critic and does not under­stand that the sec­tion labels at Barnes & Noble are only sug­ges­tions. They do not under­stand that gen­res, since the rise of post­mod­ernism, have been in flux. No easy way exists to clas­sify lit­er­a­ture into handy cat­e­gories. For exam­ple: do we put Langston Hughes in the Poetry, Multicultural, or Classics sec­tion of the bookstore?

Most choices are arbi­trary. The book­seller or librar­ian will help you find the book you’re look­ing for despite where it is in the store, and so long as you read and enjoy the book, you will not care what its sec­tion was labeled.

But then again, we have to remem­ber that Frey pur­posely altered facts to make the nar­ra­tive in his book flow bet­ter. Is that a crime? Absolutely not. His First Amendment rights guar­an­tee him the free­dom to express him­self as he sees fit, so long as his speech is not hate­ful or dam­ag­ing to other peo­ple; and no mat­ter how upset Oprah’s book club mem­bers are, they were not hurt by the fact that Frey altered some facts to make a bet­ter story.

What really gets at peo­ple is that they were inspired by Frey’s book, and for some rea­son that inspi­ra­tion is more gen­uine if it is inspired by true events in the book they read. They can­not be thus inspired or enlight­ened by fic­tion, it seems. For that rea­son, when peo­ple learned that cer­tain parts of the book weren’t true, they felt betrayed. They became angry, and that speaks vol­umes for the power of lit­er­a­ture to inspire and moti­vate peo­ple to action.

And finally, we can­not leave this dis­cus­sion with­out a brief men­tion of TheSmokingGun.com, the site that first blew the lid off Frey’s sup­posed fraud. What does it say about our lit­er­a­ture cul­ture that we have peo­ple out there ded­i­cated to seek­ing out every lit­tle mis­take or fib made by authors and other pub­lic fig­ures? There is such a thing as over­sight, but to what extent does it need to be car­ried before we call it excessive?

In the end, James Frey should not admit to any wrong­do­ing. He did noth­ing wrong. He might apol­o­gize to those read­ers who felt deceived, but those read­ers must learn that lit­er­a­ture is not some­thing you can nail with a word or cat­e­gory. If we try to do that, we sti­fle artis­tic expres­sion among the peo­ple are are out there writ­ing books right now, try­ing to inspire the next gen­er­a­tion. All this law­suit and hub­bub has done is make those authors all the more self-conscious about putting word to screen/paper.

Related posts:

1. The sad case of non-hoaxster James Conradt
2. Elemental Stylism