So there he was, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, taking a tongue lashing from his disappointed mom. Who had trusted him, and he had abused that trust and let her down.
It was rather delicious to see James Frey sitting there on Oprah’s couch and just enduring it. Delicious because he deserved it, the lying rat -- no, he’s worse: he’s a lying rat who’s made a bloody fortune off his lies. And he has proved himself even worse-worse on Oprah: he’s a sniveling lying rat who doesn’t even have the balls to claim his lying as his own and say, “You know what, Oprah? Yeah, I lied. And you ate it up. And so did your sheeplike viewers. And now -- heh -- I’m gonna go lie on a beach in the Caribbean. Suckers.”
That would have been more in keeping with Gen X’s character, with our general not-giving-a-shit-ness. Jerry Stahl (a Boomer, no less), in his snarky smackdown of Frey in L.A. Weekly, agrees with me (sorta):
Seeing the author show up on Larry King to face the music with his mom by his side -- well, it was one of those television moments you feel privileged to witness. After all the hardcore PR, you half expected to see Bob Mitchum roll onto the set with a five-day beer fur and take a bite out of the microphone. Instead, we’re treated to a well-behaved young prepster in a button-down shirt, the Richie Rich who gets his mom to spring him from detention. Short of finding out Frey was the third member of Milli Vanilli, it couldn’t have been more exciting.
Which shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who read Frey’s undated author’s essay on Powells.com, which ends with his announcement of the music he played while writing the now-disputed book:
I listened to Bruce Springsteen, Anthrax, Run DMC, Taj Mahal, Queen, Journey and Debbie Gibson.
Debbie Gibson? I’m now half inclined to believe the entire Frey affair -- from the original shopping of the book as fiction to the hilariously weaselly mea culpa that will appear in future editions of the book -- is a giant piece of performance art that has Frey laughing all the way to the bank. There will be future editions of the book, after all...
And it’s not like he wasn’t dishing it out when he we thought he was such a tough guy that he had root canal without novocaine. In 2003 in Salon, he had this to say:
The big noise began with a now-famous New York Observer interview, two full months before the book's release, in which the 33-year-old Frey wasted no time sawing off the legs of his rivals. "I don't give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don't give a fuck what any of those people do. I don't hang out with them, I'm not friends with them, I'm not part of the literati." Don't even get him started on Dave Eggers. "A book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don't give a fuck what they think about me. I'm going to try to write the best book of my generation and I'm going to try to be the best writer."
Frey could have been the guy to stand up for us as a generation -- if he let the side down, it wasn’t for writing a crappy book that he could only sell if he passed it off as a case of truth being stranger than fiction, it’s that he let Oprah push him around like that. Who elected Oprah the nation’s Disappointed Mom, and why the hell isn’t she scolding the people whose lies really matter? Not that I’m justifying what they did at all, but why is it only the relatively inconsequential lies of Xers that everyone gets their panties in a twist over? Frey, The New Republic’s Stephen Glass, The New York Times’ Jason Blair... they’re excoriated for comparatively harmless fibs while the journalistic transgressions of the Times’ Judith Miller -- which helped lead the U.S. into unjustified war -- go unrebuked by Oprah... and just about everyone else except liberal bloggers preaching to a tiny choir. What’s more, Miller has not only gone unsmacked, she got to play the martyr in a phony freedom-of-the-press issue that confused the genuinely important need to protect conscientious whistleblowers from the powerful they nobly snitch on with a wrongheaded CYA attempt to cover up the misdeeds of the powerful when they abuse their power.
Maybe it’s mere coincidence that everyone’s dumping on the Xers, including us ourselves: The Smoking Gun, which broke the Frey story, is Xer-run (editor William Bastone is 40), and perhaps unsurprisingly, the young crew at The New Republic is all “we were so onto Frey from the beginning”. Maybe, as Jerry Stahl in L.A. Weekly sarcastically notes, the problem isn’t with Frey but with his detractors:
[W]ake up and smell the Zeitgeist. The Truth is so 20th Century.... This is what the picky-picky crowd don’t get, folks. No. 1 seller Frey has transcended literature. He’s embraced the “non-reality based media” concept with as much vigor as the president’s own reality managers. Like the commander in chief, he has freed himself from the bondage of fact. Indeed, the parallels with George W. Bush are somehow heartening. Because no other author seems willing to step up and sign on with the truth that hunkers like the proverbial elephant in America’s living room: The truth that there is no truth.
If I thought that was the truth, though, I’d be suffering some real despair right now.
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