Katerina

The controversy surrounding Frey's A Million Little Pieces obscured the striking work he does, as evidenced by his new novel, not a memoir but driven by Frey's experience as a writer. In propulsive, shattering prose, the narrative moves primarily between 2017 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris as a successful but emotionally end-of-his-rope author is thrown back to his raucous, raunchy, revelatory, hopeful young days in the City of Light and his affair with the heart-stopping Katerina. Carousing as much as he's writing, brazenly determined to produce something that "burn[s] the fucking world down," Jay is sitting in front of Auguste Rodin's The Gates of Hell when he's accosted by a tart, imperturbable woman in a skull-covered dress, and despite his initial rude resistance he falls passionately in love. Their affair and its lasting consequences are told mostly in a cascade of fractured, one-liners—whether exchange, interior monolog, or, later, email—resulting in an immediacy of content without the weight of backstory. The ending could have been maudlin, but it's not.