A Million Little Failures

On James Frey's 'Next to Heaven'

James Frey in Torino, Italy, 2009, Photograph, Leonardo Cendamo via Getty Images

I went to the launch party for James Frey’s Next to Heaven mostly to see Carole Radziwill. In the eight years that I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never seen any of our “Real Housewives” in person, despite being alert to the possibility — despite remaining hopeful that it will happen — whenever I’m on the Upper East Side for a doctor appointment, or at Balthazar for someone’s birthday dinner, or find myself walking by Zarin Fabrics. I’m sure if I spent more time in these kinds of well-heeled spaces, it would inevitably happen. But I can only tolerate them as a novelty, that side of the city being so alien and spiritually nauseating compared to my own (which lies mostly in what the political writer Michael Lange recently dubbed the “Commie Corridor”).

So, when Dream Baby Press posted the flyer for Frey’s book launch with Carole’s name on the list of featured readers, I bought a ticket, despite my indifference for the author being feted. I was in elementary school when his addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces came out, as well as when Oprah publicly shamed him for having fabricated a lot of it. Twenty years later, while I do remember the scandal — I certainly remember the South Park episode about it — the details are fuzzy. When I recently saw him at another Dream Baby event, it wasn’t until halfway through his reading that I thought, Wait, this is the guy who lied about having cancer or whatever? Not quite, but who cares. Autofiction is the mode of our times now; maybe he just got in too early. And at any rate, 30 bucks for a complimentary hardcover, an open bar, and an opportunity to finally share air with one of my favorite Wives was a good enough deal for me.

If Carole’s appearance in the lineup seemed random, it wasn’t that strange. She was the most erudite of The Real Housewives of New York cast, which isn’t a particularly remarkable feat, but she is a memoirist and novelist. Plus, Dream Baby events are usually a little stunty, sometimes taking place in a Burger King or a boxing ring and often featuring readings from nonwriters like Jemima Kirke and AnnaSophia Robb. (Personally, I appreciate their efforts. Readings are generally very boring, and I say that as someone who likes to go to them. If you’re going to charge admission, it’s only considerate hosting to have a gimmick — and, even better, free booze.)

At the party, I began digging into my new copy of Next to Heaven, and from the first page I realized that Carole’s presence was a bit of meta-commentary. The novel follows a network of lethally bored, ultra-rich yuppies in the fictional town of New Bethlehem, Connecticut. Two housewives form the nucleus of the story: Devon Kensington McCallister, a “glamorous WASP of the East Coast,” and Belle Hedges Moore, a “Texas oil heiress and Dallas debutante,” who together run New Bethlehem in every way short of elected office.

I pawed awkwardly through the first few chapters, the book in one hand and a glass of free pinot noir held precariously in the other. Reading it amidst the buzz of the packed room, I found it flat, but I was still willing to give Frey the benefit of the doubt. It was hard for me to give his words my undivided attention when only a few rows of folding chairs away, his friend Gina Gershon was mingling with Lower Manhattan’s most canceled couple, Sarah Hoover and Tom Sachs.

But back at my apartment, with no stars of Showgirls present to cast a glint of glamour by proxy, I read further and came to understand Next to Heaven for what it is, which unfortunately is a piece of shit.

Bored with their finance-bro husbands, Devon and Belle organize a swingers party. They rig the pairing system so that Devon ends up with Alex “Alexander the Great” Hunter — the golden boy of New Bethlehem, who went off to play in the NFL and then at some point returned to make a fortune in banking — and Belle ends up with Charlie Dunlap, a 20-something hockey coach with whom Devon is already having an affair but whom she is happy to share with her “Bestie for Fucking Ever” (Frey’s words). The women get their way, but of course, it comes at a cost: We know from the beginning that somehow, someone will die as a result of this party.

The murder-mystery plot adheres to the White Lotus model, wherein there’s less anticipation over who-done-it than who’s-it-gonna-be. Probably this is because Frey wants you to grow to care about these characters before one of them is offed. But ultimately, the tragedy of this story is that it was only one of them.

Aside from their gender, the residents of New Bethlehem are nearly indistinguishable from one another. The men all made their money in finance, except Charlie, who coaches children’s hockey. The women are all from wealthy families and then married rich, except Charlie’s girlfriend, Katy, who coaches children’s lacrosse. Here is everything you need to know beyond that: Billy, Devon’s husband, is the richest and meanest one; Alex is also rich and mean but slightly less so; Teddy, Belle’s husband, has erectile dysfunction; and then Devon is blonde, Belle is brunette, and Katy is the poor one. (Alex also has a wife, Grace, whose hair is red.) They all cheat on each other, but everyone is too bored, horny, and rich to care much about it.

For a book that’s essentially about sex, there aren’t as many descriptions of the actual act as you might expect — something like “they fucked wildly” is often the extent of it — but the ones there are, are disgusting. “He was fully erect, his yogurt cannon locked and loaded, ready to fire.” Or: “ . . . a Boss Lady Bone Machine and a sheet-shaking, booty-quaking, lovemaking shag Goddess.” Even Teddy’s impotence isn’t an impediment for Frey: “And while they had fun . . . there was no well-cooked tube steak and no coconut cream explosion.”

Yuck!!!!! Sometimes after reading one of these diabolical phrases, I’d flip to Frey’s author photo on the dust jacket just to see the sick soul who crafted them, a habit that I can only describe as a kind of psychic self-harm.

Frey’s narrative voice wavers between the casual and contemporary — for example, Charlie “could absolutely not ever ever ever quit hockey. That would be like Santa quitting Claus” — and something more formal, gesturing limply toward Jamesian and Whartonian tales of high society. Here’s one sentence from an early chapter, in which Frey traces the history of New Bethlehem in excruciatingly granular detail, from its colonial founding to its current economic and social demographics:

Today, New Bethlehem remains what it has long been, and will likely remain for as long as it exists, a place where wealthy people who value privacy and discretion, and who make achievement, both educational and athletic, a priority, live quietly and raise their families.

This is a sentence I can only assume Frey constructed with the specific intention to waste his reader’s time. Any other conclusion I can draw just feels like mudslinging, and I’ve done enough of that already.

So much of reading Next to Heaven felt like having my intelligence passively insulted, condescended to. Frey told Vanity Fair that he got the idea for the story while reading Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives, which he’d been asked to potentially turn into a TV show. “I didn’t end up doing it, but I loved the book. The reading experience of it made me think, You know what, man, maybe you should just write a fun book.” The reading experience of Next to Heaven is decidedly un-fun. All it left me with was the impression that Frey considers himself much cleverer than his source material, and if he had a specific audience in mind as he wrote it, much cleverer than them, too. Some slop for the piggies, I can imagine he thought as he pounded out yet more lines like:

“There was anticipation in the air, there was desire in the air, there was sex.

There was hunger.

Sex and hunger.”

Or maybe more accurately, some slop for the suits at HBO. The world of Next to Heaven is so broad and lazily rendered that it often reads like a treatment for what Frey probably assumed was the inevitable miniseries. And if that was indeed the case, he was correct — he sold the TV rights before he even found a publisher.

In that same Vanity Fair interview, he claims he wrote that book “really fast,” in about two months. An aid to his speed: generative AI. He explains, “I use AI as a writer the same way I used to use Google . . . . I don’t use generative AI to actually compose sentences or put together the text. I mean, I guess I do use it to put together the text of the book. But when we were talking earlier about Next to Heaven, and I said, ‘I would look up what’s the most expensive silverware ever made,’ AI just gives you the answer a lot fucking faster.”

The interviewer, Keziah Weir, pushes back, claiming that she prompted ChatGPT, “Give me a history of a fictional town called New Bethlehem, which is similar to New Canaan” — where Frey lives — and that it spat out something similar to that early chapter I mentioned. “I didn’t use AI for the town history,” Frey asserts. But, he continues, “AI is helpful, man. It helps me with a lot of things . . . . using AI as a tool to make me a better writer or a more efficient writer, or to help me use funnier words or to get information I don’t know, or have, I don’t have any issue with it.”

(This press tour has been Frey’s first major one since the aughts, and the primary message of his comeback has been one threatening destruction: “I want to burn the fucking world down,” he said on the podcast How Long Gone. I guess abusing ChatGPT is one way to do that.)

I don’t know if I trust Frey, who, regardless of your take on the A Million Little Pieces ordeal, is technically famous for lying about things. But ultimately, whether or not he used AI to write any part of this book is irrelevant, because I read the whole thing before I knew that and still thought it fucking stunk. While I wouldn’t describe Next to Heaven’s plot twist as “predictable” — I would hope that an idea so dumb and contrived wouldn’t spring from my own imagination — it still lands with barely a thud. The conceit of it undermines the first sentences of the book and the entire mood of ironic ennui that Frey tries to establish with them. “Devon often dreamed of punching her husband in the face,” it opens. “He often didn’t do anything to deserve it. She was just tired of him.” I hope you don’t mind if I spoil this, but Frey then spends the rest of the book outlining the myriad reasons why Devon’s husband does deserve to be punched in the face, reasons including physically and psychologically abusing her, as well as their maid, with whom Devon bonds over their shared torment. And, to be clear, “abuse” is a word that’s used in the book, not just my own conclusion. This brings up another problem: Next to Heaven’s treatment of abuse and sexual assault is beyond trite and a blatantly cheap ploy at manufacturing sympathy for otherwise hollow and intolerably boring characters.

On How Long Gone, Frey described his writing process as a kind of trance state, which he calls “thinking without thinking.” Allegedly, any time he writes a book, he sits down to work for 12 to 14 hours a day, every day, until the book is done. (He also goes off his SSRIs for the duration of the process, as supervised by his therapist, who was formerly the team psychologist for the Mets.) Once a book is done, he doesn’t look at it again. “I’ve never read a book I’ve written,” he claims. “Every book I’ve ever written, except for Million Little Pieces, was a first draft.”

This is what I mean when I say that reading Next to Heaven was an insulting experience: If engaging with this book isn’t even worth Frey’s time, why does he think it’s worth ours? A second look was the least he could have done, even if only to correct certain egregious errors (such as on page 116: “He could feel his virality flowing through his veins”). Frey’s breakneck speed is no sign of virtuosity, nor even impressive audacity, when the product is as bad as it is. All it shows on his part is a slovenly approach to the craft.

I use the word “product” intentionally; it seems clear to me that this is a book that was written mostly just to be sold. Somehow, Frey’s stab at writing his own Jackie Collins novel is leagues shallower than the prototype. If Next to Heaven is any proof, his understanding of why Hollywood Wives is a fun book goes no deeper than the observation, People are obsessed with sex and money. Even Collins knows it’s a bit more pimply than that. She, at least, understands glamour in the original sense of the word — as in, a kind of magic. Within the first couple pages of Hollywood Wives, we know that one of her leading ladies, Elaine Conti, was originally Etta Grodonski, a chubby Jewish girl from the Bronx who moved out West, lost the weight, got a new nose, new teeth, new hair, new tits, blue contact lenses, and a succession of increasingly high-profile husbands. Yet despite managing to transform her physical appearance beyond the realm of what should be humanly possible, her personality is uncontainably vulgar. She’s a deeply angry person, abusive to the help, and a compulsive shoplifter.

Frey’s women, on the other hand, are “glamorous” by the most banal, brainless definition. “She was legitimately and stunningly gorgeous,” he describes Devon. “She was tall, thin, and had deep blue eyes like a warm calm sea . . . .” The residents of New Bethlehem are all naturally thin and traditionally beautiful, and the darkness that lurks beneath their “flawless veneers,” of which the dust jacket copy warns, is mostly just the kind of existential boredom that’s inevitable when a person wants for nothing. It’s the kind of vacuousness that leads people to invent problems for themselves, and for the most part, invented problems are at the heart of the conflict in Next to Heaven. This could make for a funny story if it weren’t for all the rape and abuse, which Frey shoehorns in like a foot blistered and rubbed raw inside a too-small Louboutin. The only way, apparently, that he can think to make his beautiful people multidimensional is to inflict horrific violence upon them. But still, no matter what indignities they face, they always manage to stand up straight, smooth out the wrinkles. The veneer remains flawless. It’s a choice that ultimately leaves the whole thing feeling less like a satire than a treacly melodrama.

I think Real Housewives is a good show because it is above all about the cracks in the facade. Sure, there are some people who watch it because they find the Wives aspirational, and feel an earnest investment in their dramas. But the fact that the biggest stars of the show are always the craziest, drunkest, meanest women in the cast is proof to me that the looming shadow of money is not enough to make people interested. What people really want to see — or, at least, what I want to see — are those moments of seemingly dissonant vulgarity, when people who have more than I could ever hope to drink themselves stupid, fall down stairs, get arrested, and scream at each other over shit that doesn’t matter. It’s all evidence of the ugly, imperfect humanity that lurks inside us all, which, even if you can afford to try to smother it with keratin treatments and sea moss gels and red light therapies and chemical peels and dermal fillers and botulinum injections, will always find a way to surface.

Annie Fell is the editor-in-chief of Talkhouse Music. Her writing has appeared in Pitchfork, SPIN, Forever Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s on Substack at zit remedies.