Whatever else you might say about Frey, he possesses in spades the key quality for success in the twenty-first century: shamelessness ... Henry Miller is the clear inspiration, but the sex in Katerina reminded me less of Tropic of Cancer and more of the scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin in which Steve Carell’s character tries to bluff his way through a conversation about women by comparing breasts to bags of sand. Where Miller was, at the very least, inventively crude, Frey is artificial and bland ... Frey clearly wants you to read this soliloquy as an earnest challenge he’s offering himself in real life. If it is, Katerina is a particularly damp response. But I’m not sure I can give him even that much credit. It’s hard to imagine that Frey genuinely believes the story of a young man and his model girlfriend screwing in Paris will 'burn the world down.' But someone with experience in the publishing industry, and with producing young-adult fiction, might recognize that a melodramatic and slightly seedy romance with a tinge of newsy metatextual frisson is an eminently marketable book ripe for a Hollywood studio to option ... It’s possible that Katerina is an utterly heartfelt novel, and that Frey is an authentically inept writer, rather than a calculatingly bad one. But how could anyone tell? When you build a career as a cynical fraud, even your incompetence becomes suspicious.
James Frey’s first adult novel in 10 years, claims Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as its literary North Star...Unfortunately, Jay’s Paris lacks the soul, guts and groin of Miller’s rendering, reading more like a student’s account of his study abroad ... Even when wet, Katerina is ever the dry fantasy, tossing off orgasm after orgasm from penetration alone. Each of Jay’s women — and there are several in the book—is also suspiciously easily-turned-on. A quickie against a car with a college ex results in simultaneous orgasms that leave her 'shaking.' One wonders if our protagonist knows what cunnilingus is at all? ... Jay’s libertine dreams similarly leave the reader cold. He frequently professes a desire to 'burn the world down,' but one wonders which world he is talking about exactly ... With Katerina, the question of autobiography doesn’t matter so much. Regardless of how true this tale is to Frey’s own personal story, the fictional version cries out for a richer, more succulent imagining.
Those who have had the misfortune to come across a stranger masturbating in public usually feel a mixture of shock, revulsion and embarrassment. Much the same emotions are engendered when, on page three of James Frey’s much-awaited and largely autobiographical new novel, the protagonist, Jay, announces: 'Follow your heart and follow your cock.' Over the course of the book’s unedifying length, there is a great deal about Jay’s cock, and its machinations, which is described in tedious detail. What is never supplied is a reason why the reader should engage with Frey’s pretentious and vacuous alter ego ... Frey has created a loathsome character whose antediluvian attitudes towards anyone who isn’t male, American and 'a writer' make this an unappealing and old-fashioned wallow in glorifying empty masculine privilege. Were Harvey Weinstein not awaiting trial on charges of sexual assault, he would undoubtedly be first in line to buy the film rights ... The controversy behind A Million Little Pieces once threatened to derail Frey’s career. Fifteen years and many million sales later, the dreadful Katerina represents a new and, in its own perverse way, impressive attempt at career suicide. If this is to be his epitaph, let it at least be said of him that he followed his heart – and his cock.
Why do we keep giving all those extra chances to less-than-mediocre men? ... The book sucks ... Katerina is the novel any weedy college bro high on Henry Miller and the Beat poets would write if he kept banging away at his vintage Olivetti long enough: hysterically emotive, narratively pedestrian, exhilarated by its own borrowed style ... This plot reeks of wish-fulfillment ― the gorgeous, desirable model; their charmed love story; her candle held for him decades later; his destiny as the one writer in his generation who would, as he puts it, 'burn the fucking world down' ... A doomed romance can certainly be compelling, with the aid of fresh language or lively characters. But Katerina wafts through the novel as little more than a sexy red pout atop two long shapely gams, and the narrator, while enraptured by his own navel, never manages to describe that navel, or the affair, with anything approaching insight or originality ... His favorite words include classics like 'fuck,' 'life,' 'crazy,' 'pain,' 'sex,' 'art' and 'love,' and he’s unafraid to reuse them, often many times on the same page ... It’s as though Frey can’t think of any fresh ways to say or describe things, so he resorts to repeating his words, hoping the repetition will stand in for throbbing inspiration.
...the only thing you really need to know about Katerina is that it’s ridiculous, a book so heated by narcissism that you have to read it wearing oven mitts ... Katerina offers a volcanic regurgitation of Frey’s dream of writing a bestseller, his descent into addiction and the literary scandal that made him infamous. The author seems to believe that his fall from grace is burned into America’s consciousness like the fall of Saigon ... I don’t know if his life would be easier, but his prose would be better if he actually looked at anything, if he tried to capture on the page something specific and fresh about his experience instead of leaning on a few trite rhetorical flourishes.
James Frey has long flaunted a disregard for what he views as the 'rules' of literature. Strange, then, that he sticks fastidiously to the one rolled out across seminars the world over: write what you know ... Frey has twice returned to the subject of that debut — himself ... Katerina [is] possibly the most under-developed titular character ever created ... Later, a bizarre and rushed finale introduces the thorny topic of euthanasia, but as it doesn’t happen to Jay we hear virtually nothing about it ... It would have been interesting to focus on the immediate aftermath of the 2006 scandal and attempt some explanation ... this 'Bad Boy of American Letters' is woefully out of practice.
Freed to fabricate, Frey gets some things right in Katerina. He can write a convincing, voluptuous, sassy woman who’s irresistible until you wonder what Katerina sees in Jay. He can create an anti-hero protagonist who toggles between likable and insufferable. And he knows the City of Light firsthand, layering in a nice Parisian backdrop ... But Frey’s frenzied style causes plotus interruptus often in this sensually fiery tale. Frey fans might love it, but his stream-of-consciousness, run-on sentences, disjointed prose, broken grammar and word repetition is ponderous and wears you down ... In the end, Katerina reads like Frey’s latest foray into himself, even something of mea culpa for the memoir that earned him infamy and fortune.
If Frey can’t make readers forget his highly public literary lows, he proves he can dynamically reimagine his past into a page-turner, in his signature stream-of-consciousness style.
...it’s all the stuff of an Ethan Hawke movie, and there’s not a surprising moment in it. What does surprise, perhaps, are Frey’s spasms of high-toned porn ... James Joyce it ain’t, and though it’s marginally more literate than E.L. James, it’s nothing the aforementioned Mr. Hawke couldn’t pull off on screen and behind the keyboard. A long-anticipated return that many readers will decide wasn’t worth the wait.
After receiving a Facebook message from his former lover, Jay begins to recollect his debaucherous years in Paris in a series of vignettes that read like poor imitations of Henry Miller, rendered in choppy, disjointed prose that readers of Frey’s earlier works will recognize ... While the narrative hinges on Jay’s thoughts about writing a great book, it does little to convince the reader that Jay is actually a talented writer. This quixotic novel might make some readers reconsider Frey’s legacy, but the story itself will leave most wanting.
