In a world of excess, best friends Devon and Belle have it all—beauty, money, status. But they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party—a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem’s elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women, and a ruthless Wall Street “closer” who wields his wealth like a weapon. One night. An ultra-elite swingers party. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem’s carefully constructed facade.
The book is provocative in a familiar way ... I have wrestled with a Frey-like dread through the writing of this review—I’m afraid that I’ll describe his book and no one will believe me ... To give credit to Frey where it’s due, his prose can be endearingly excitable ... As satire, Next to Heaven is unintelligible, as though someone is universalizing their own hangups and then skewering them for clout.
James Frey boasts that it took him a mere 57 days to write Next to Heaven, a trashy murder-mystery set among the bored ultra-rich in Connecticut. This I can believe. There are books that gain a kinetic force from being composed in a feverish sprint and then there are books where you wonder if some hapless editor has sent the wrong draft to the printer ... Next to Heaven feels less like a novel than notes for a novel, prompts even, almost as if Frey tossed together a few reference points—Bret Easton Ellis, Jackie Collins, Couples by John Updike—and asked a a certain large-language model to come up with the goods ... It’s just that it reads almost uncannily like a cynical remix of any number of super-rich satires or thrillers we’ve been treated to in recent years. Like Liane Moriarty’s novel Big Little Lies, the story is set in a 'picture perfect' small town. It features a gossipy Greek chorus narration and a heavily foreshadowed murder. There are frustrated cops, themes of domestic abuse and rape and an unlikely sisterhood, which given the tone of Frey’s previous book, Katerina seems unlikely to have been born from any native feminist instinct ... Katerina (2018) won a bad sex award and was described by one critic as 'an impressive attempt at career suicide'. And yet Frey seems to have failed even in this attempt because here he still is ... Next to Heaven confirms that Frey is a very, very lazy writer. His sentences read like schoolboy attempts at hardboiled style and contain some of the corniest lines I’ve read in fiction ... Frey doesn’t let editors touch a word of his—this I can also believe ... What’s particularly strange, given that he’s such a 'bad boy', is that he completely fluffs the wife-swapping soirée ... For a book about bad behaviour, the characters behave in remarkably boring and predictable ways. They have no foibles or contradictions. No one in the novel feels remotely real. The characters are dead, the language is dead and it says terrible things about publishing that this ever saw the light of day.
Frey has found a groove with this gleefully trashy page-turner set among the one percent ... Frey’s literary affectations don’t get in the way of the good times. Let the revels begin!
