'A million little pieces' review by Book Club Member Nick..

There are some films out there that you only need to watch once. ‘Titanic’, ‘The Road’ and ‘Schindler’s List’ are three such films. One viewing will shock you in all the right places, sadden you and make you smile where it’s designed, but watching it again loses the impact. ‘A Million Little Pieces’ is like that in a book.

 

‘A Million Little Pieces’ is a tricky book. Its part memoir and part fiction and for me, bloody hard to review. After checking out information about the book and from what I’ve heard, it appears that it’s been subject to controversy because some of the events may or may not have happened. Well, for the sake of the review, I’m going to judge it as a work of fiction. The truth behind the events are irrelevant, because as a story it is incredible.

 

First things first, James Frey (author and protagonist) is an alcoholic and an addict and after an undescribed incident on a plane, he’s sent to rehab where the book stays to the end. He describes his time there, his refusal to get better, the people he meets and eventually how his parents come by to help him out. There’s no real twist anywhere, it really is just one man’s recollection of his time in rehab. However, he is also in love with a girl called Lily. It becomes clear that these two broken people need one another and it makes for exciting times when they sneak out into the clearing to spend time together. Those times break up what can be quite a monotonous read. 

The story itself is sound, it’s engaging and after a long time of hating James Frey, I found myself hoping he’d get better. His battle with his crippled mind is well told in that sense, but when you get to the business of the writing style and the language, that’s when I frown. For some reason, James Frey makes really simple things incredibly descriptive and he takes his sweet time telling you something from time to time. For example, he often says: ‘He stands. I stand.’ Or: ‘He shook my hand. I shook his hand.’ Why? Keeping things so slow doesn’t add anything to what he’s saying, why not shorten them to: ‘We stood’ or, ‘We shook hands’? Also, he capitalizes nouns for no apparent reason and he repeats himself constantly so the phrase he’s used has lost all meaning and become mundane, exactly what such quotes shouldn’t be. On one hand, I hate all of that, but on the other, I love it. It really sells the story that James Frey is writing with a brain that’s been intoxicated to oblivion and on the page to him it may all make perfect sense. But, as a reader, even knowing he’s not the clearest-headed man in the world and that it works in tandem with the story’s atmosphere, it’s still frustrating to read through pointless prose to get to the point all along. Sometimes it felt like he was trying to convince me that he has intelligence with his quirky phrases, when all along he’s just slowing the pace down.

Apart from the irritating writing style and use of language, ‘A Million Little Pieces’ is a heartbreakingly sad and uplifting book all at the same time, and I reckon I’d love it if anybody but James Frey wrote it. I don’t buy some things that happened in the book such as his dental appointment without drugs and I don’t buy the character. At twenty-three, he’s had just about every lethal substance you can think in his system and when he lists all of his substance abuses and fights, for me it is inconceivable how he is alive.

 

I burned through the first eighty pages because the writing style was so different to anything I’d read before, but after that I struggled to finish it and that’s because of the writing style. Like I said, the story is great, good characters and sometimes they are frightening, like Roy for example. But, I think the book was far too long for what was there and I reckon that you could cut out a good hundred pages and it wouldn’t lose a thing. I wouldn’t read it again, but I reckon you should.