A Million Little Pieces-
a review by Jules Siegel
posted April 7, 2003
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
By James Frey
384 pages, $22.95
April, 2003
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, New York
"I woke to the drone of an airplane
engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin,"
begins "A Million Little Pieces," James Frey's story
of his ascent from crackhouse ground zero. "I lift my hand
and feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole
in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly
shut." His clothes are covered with spit, snot, vomit and
blood. He doesn't know how he got on the plane or where he is
going, but as he soon finds out, he's on his way to rehab.
This is today's "Bright Lights, Big
City." Instead of cocaine and The New Yorker we've got crack
and a rehabilitation treatment center in Minnesota. The
grungy editorial style diligently avoids glorifying the brilliant
descriptions of medical torture, explicit (and often hideously
demeaning) sex and even more explicit drugs. A stream-of-consciousness
lite effect is provided by the absence of quotation marks and
paragraph indents. Certain words are idiosyncratically capitalized
-- the Bathroom, the Nurses -- perhaps to suggest that old cosmic
paranoia feeling that comes with over-indulgence in hallucinatory
substances; perhaps to be literary and cute.
Despite the Burroughs-inflected literary
tics, this is an emotionally penetrating narrative that faithfully
portrays the institutional rehabilitation process. It's very commercial,
too. Unlike "Naked Lunch," it would make a nice gift
for a friend considering detox (one of the Bush girls, maybe?),
whether as a warning or a comfort. Faithful to hallowed marketing
considerations going back to St. Augustine, all users are portrayed
as hopeless addicts. Drug rapture is described in physical and
sexual terms and always leads to horrible crashes. There are no
hints that self-medication can be a very effective form of self-treatment
for emotional and physical maladies.
James Frey operates in a literary zone where
the worst case rules to the exclusion of all others. You can't
write about the masterpieces that are created while enraptured,
the psychological knots untied, the revival of the sheer joy of
living. No one can handle drugs. Period. Got that clear? Begin
writing. These days, when so many successful folks routinely rely
on weird brain torques without requiring professional detoxification,
it's not easy to get a gifted writer to fit a book into this Procrustean
headlock, much less sign it. It appears that "Go Ask Alice,"
by Anonymous, the eternally best-selling classic teenage descent-into-drug-hell
tale, supposedly based on a fifteen-year-old girl's diary, was
faked. As far as anyone can tell, there never was any teenaged
girl's diary. Beatrice Matthews Sparks, a Mormon lady from Utah,
most likely made it all up.
In "A Million Little Pieces", they've
got something better -- a real (and very talented) writer with
a real story who believes very firmly in individual responsibility.
The author portrays himself as quite heroic in both his rebellion
and his determination to quit, reminding me of John Galt in "Atlas
Shrugged." Although it has some synthetic moments, the book
is obviously sincere, but the resolution finally boils down to
"Just say no."
Frey's case demonstrates that the treatment
model can work if the victim is a highly motivated upper-class
college drop-out with a concrete physical infancy trauma that
can be rooted out in therapy. It also helps to have a loving family
show up to help out, even if Dad does have to leave in the middle
on one of his emergency business trips. Then there are the political
connections made in rehab that enable him to avoid having to do
time for an outstanding conviction. Frey mentions these factors
in passing, but mainly attributes his recovery to willpower.
"A Million Little Pieces" could
be part of the softening-up campaign for the switch toward treatment
rather than punishment. Venereal disease prevention in Paris in
the 17th Century eventually led to the criminalization of prostitution.
Now the high cost of drug criminalization results in the need
to declare recreational drug use or self-medication to be symptoms
of a treatable disease. Unfortunately, the involuntary treatment
model as currently formatted is merely another take on criminalization.
It's a lot better than jail for abusers of dangerous addictive
drugs such as crack, cocaine, speed and heroin, but how many people
would need treatment for marijuana dependency except to avoid
prison?
The cost of scorched earth drug enforcement
is distorting the entire criminal justice system so ferociously
that government financial administrators at all levels are hard
put to pay for it. Just as the mentally ill were turned out on
the streets because it was so much cheaper, outpatient therapy
enforced by the threat of imprisonment will now replace the war
on drugs, at least for middle class whites. It probably won't
work, but it doesn't use weapons resources that would better go
to conventional wars of conquest.
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JULES SIEGEL's reports on drugs, crime and
alternate culture have appeared in Playboy, Rolling Stone, Village
Voice and many other publications.
