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Forbes
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Finesse And Terroir: Oregon's Sparkling Wines Shine At Method Oregon
Some of the sparkling wines being featured at the Method Oregon Grand Tasting Photo, courtesy Method Oregon/Sarah Murdoch Oregon's reputation for world-class Pinot Noir and Chardonnay has naturally evolved into one of the country's most exciting sparkling wine movements. While its annual output of roughly 150,000 cases is modest compared to California's, Oregon now ranks third nationally in sparkling wine production—and first in many quality-focused circles: cool-climate viticulture, marine-influenced terroirs, and a commitment to traditional méthode champenoise drive sparkling winemaking here. The result is a diverse array of wines that combine finesse, intensity, and remarkable site expression. On Saturday, July 26, 2025, the Method Oregon Grand Tasting will showcase the depth and breadth of this category in what promises to be the largest sparkling wine event ever held in the Willamette Valley. Below are tasting notes on a selection of some of Oregon's top sparkling wines featured at the event. A young brand launched in 2017, Corollary shifted its focus from cider to terroir-driven, traditional-method sparkling wines. It's produced in the Van Duzer Corridor from soils consisting of marine sediments over volcanic silt loam and cooled by marine winds. The wine exhibits a delicate mousse featuring citrus-lime zest, layered with brioche, pear, and subtle minerality. The bead is tight with a refined texture and a crisp, lingering finish. Score 96/100 Pashey Blanc de Blancs, Extra Brut, Ribbon Ridge Estate, 12.7% ABV, 750 ml. Ribbon Ridge, Willamette Valley. $65 Created in 2013 by artist and founder James Frey of Trisaetum, Pashey produces Burgundian-style sparkling wines, characterized by a well-defined mousse and precise bubbles. This Blanc de Blancs is considered the winery's flagship. The wine features a towering mousse expressing aromas of marzipan, apricot, Meyer lemon, and Granny Smith apple. The palate exhibits a crisp minerality, with a saline note, fine acidity, and a long, crisp finish. Score 95/100 Argyle Extended Tirage 2014 Brut, 12.5% ABV, 750 ml. Dundee Hills and Eola-Amity Hills, Willamette Valley. $80 Argyle is Oregon's largest sparkling wine producer. This bottling is part of its Extended Tirage series and has been aged for 10 years or more on lees. It's a blend of 65% Pinot Noir, 30% Chardonnay, and 15% Pinot Meunier. Vineyard soils are a combination of Jory, Nekia, and Ritner, all derived from decomposed volcanic basalts. The wine has an ultra-fine creamy mousse, featuring aromas of yeasty brioche, stone fruit, and apple. The palate showcases bright acidity, saline minerality, and an impeccably integrated structure. Score: 94/100 Domaine Willamette 2021 Brut Rosé, 12.1% ABV, 750 ml, Willamette Valley. $80 Domaine Willamette specializes in estate-grown sparkling wines crafted from grapes sourced throughout the Willamette Valley. The rosé is part of their méthode traditionnelle portfolio, produced from the Woodburn series soils, characterized by deep, well-drained, and nutrient-rich loam. The wine features classic fine bubbles with notes of honeycomb, puff pastry, and apple. The palate exhibits flavors of pear, green mango, and candied lemon, with a bright, round structure, crisp acidity, and a long, graceful finish. Score: 90/100 A selection of sparkling wine from Pashey, one of the producers being featured at Method Oregon Photo, courtesy Pashey/Sarah Murdoch Lundeen 2015 Extra Brut Late Disgorged, Bunker Hill Vineyard Blanc de Blancs, 12.3% ABV, 750 ml., Salem Hills, Bunker Hill Vineyard, Willamette Valley. $105 Lundeen specializes in site-driven wines. Their late disgorged Blanc de Blancs is aged 6–8 years on lees before bottling. It's produced on Nekia series soils of gravelly loam at a 600 ft elevation from a Dijon Chardonnay clone. The wine features aromas of citrus and baked apple atop a creamy mousse. The palate showcases toasty brioche, Meyer lemon, stone fruit, subtle spice, with a mouthwatering acidity and a long, elegant finish. Score: 93/100 Arabilis, Johan Vineyard VDC V21, 2021 Extra Brut, 12.5% ABV, 750 ml., Van Duzer Corridor, Willamette Valley. $80 This site-specific sparkler sources fruit from Johan Vineyard in the marine wind-cooled Van Duzer Corridor. This appellation is emerging as the Willamette Valley's prime sparkler-producing region. The Johan vineyard features silty, clay-loam soils composed of marine sediments with pockets of decomposed volcanic basalt. The wine features vibrant aromas of white flowers, lemon zest, and saline minerality. The palate showcases green apple notes, with crisp acidity and a stony, minerally finish—a precise, refined, and structured sparkling wine. Score: 93/100 RMS 2014 Delayed Disgorgement Brut, 12.5% ABV, 750 ml., Willamette Valley. $110 RMS is ROCO Winery's top-tier sparkling wine made from 67% Pinot Noir and 33% Chardonnay. It has aged a full decade on the lees before its delayed disgorgement. It's produced from a variety of sedimentary and volcanic series typical of the Willamette Valley. The wine features aromas of yellow plum, pear, chamomile, and buttery pastry. The palate showcases rich vanilla, tart apple, and stone fruit flavors, with crisp acidity and an opulent texture. A voluptuous, mature sparkler that is among the best produced in Oregon. Score 99/100 Soter Estates Brut Reserve, Mineral Springs Vineyard, 12.8% ABV, Yamhill Carlton, Willamette Valley. $65 Soter's sparkler blends estate Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and reserve wines, aged in a mix of oak and stainless tanks, followed by 4+ years on lees. The vineyard soils are a mix of Ribbon Ridge/Eola-Amity marine sediments and decomposed volcanic basalt. The wine features notes of almond brioche, tangerine, dried strawberry, baked apple, and apricot. A zesty acidity and delicate mousse yield a long, nuanced, and expressive finish. Score: 95/100 Sokol Blosser 2019 Blanc de Blanc, Dundee Hills, 12.5% ABV, 750 ml., Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley. $59 Sokol Blosser's Blanc de Blanc is a classic Chardonnay sparkler, reflecting the Dundee Hills' hallmark volcanic terroir and cool climate. It's produced from the brick-red, iron-rich, well-drained Jory volcanic soils of decomposed basalt. The wine is crisp, featuring citrus and white flower aromas with flavors of pear and baked apple on the palate. It boasts a refined minerality, complemented by bright acidity, a creamy texture, and a long, smooth finish. Score 93/100 Lytle Barnett 2017 Sparkling Wine, Extra Brut, 12.5% ABV, 750 ml., Eola Amity Hills, Willamette Valley. $75 Crafted by Andy Lytle, a veteran of Argyle and Domaine Serene, Lytle-Barnett produces artisanal, slow-aged méthode traditionnelle sparklers from Eola-Amity fruit. Vineyard soils consist of marine sediments and volcanic silt loam over a subsoil of decomposed volcanic basalt. The wine features a fine bead with aromas of citrus peel, brioche, and orchard fruit. On the palate, it showcases stone fruit and subtle toast notes, complemented by lively acidity and a seamless, elegant finish. Score: 93/100 Stoller Family Estate, 2019 LaRue Blanc de Blanc Sparkling Wine, Extra Brut, 12.5% ABV, Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley. $80 Stoller, based in Oregon's Dundee Hills AVA, is a benchmark producer in the Willamette Valley, known for sustainable viticulture and estate-grown wines. This sparkling wine is crafted exclusively from Chardonnay grapes sourced from our estate vineyards, using the traditional méthode champenoise , which reflects both Old World technique and New World precision. Extended lees aging enhances its complexity, offering a refined take on Oregon sparkling wine. The wine features a fine mousse with delicate bubbles and aromas of green apple, lemon zest, and white peach, complemented by subtle notes of brioche and almond from extended lees contact. The palate is crisp and precise, showcasing flavors of citrus, orchard fruit, and a hint of minerality, all wrapped in a vibrant acidity. The finish is elegant and refreshing, with a lingering note of toasted hazelnut and chalk. Score: 95/100 The wines featured at Method Oregon reflect not only the technical precision of their makers but also the unique geological and climatic conditions that define the Willamette Valley. From volcanic Jory soils in Dundee Hills to the wind-swept marine sediments of the Van Duzer Corridor, Oregon's terroirs shine through in each glass. Whether aged for a decade on lees or freshly disgorged to capture youthful verve, these sparklers are redefining American méthode traditionnelle . More importantly, they are showcasing Method Oregon. As consumer interest in premium sparkling wine continues to grow, Oregon is poised not just to participate—but to lead—with authenticity, artistry, and a fierce dedication to place. More From Forbes Forbes Oregon Pinot Noir Rosé—Why Saignée Method Wines Stand Out By Joseph V Micallef Forbes The World's Best Pinot Noir From The 2025 Decanter World Wine Awards By Joseph V Micallef Forbes The Best West Coast Pinot Noir Wines, According To The Top Wine Competitions By Joseph V Micallef
Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on the Salt Path controversy: what should we expect from a memoir?
In the annals of literary deception, the unreliable narrator has long been a familiar figure: a useful construct in novels, a sly wink to readers who know not to trust every sentence. Less familiar, though increasingly prevalent, is the unreliable author. In an age where memoirs are published and consumed with the reverence once reserved for sacred texts, the current controversy surrounding The Salt Path and its author, Raynor Winn, reopens old questions about the uneasy covenant between truth, storytelling, and the commercial allure of authenticity. Winn's bestselling memoir, which charts a journey of homelessness, illness and redemption along Britain's South West Coast Path, was embraced not just for its lyrical prose but for its claim to lived experience. It was adapted into a film which was well received on its recent release. That it now faces scrutiny over factual inconsistencies – some significant, some trivial – recalls James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, an addiction memoir later exposed as heavily embellished. What is it about the memoir that leads to this type of controversy? Partly it is the genre's paradoxical nature: shaped by the subjective impressions of memory yet marketed as unfiltered truth. Unlike the novel, the memoir makes a tacit promise to the reader: this happened, exactly as I say it did. When that pact is broken, the betrayal is not only literary but ethical. The fault does not lie solely with authors. Publishers and readers, too, collude in the myth of the pure, unmediated self. We crave stories that are not just well-told but demonstrably true. Truth, in this context, becomes a kind of currency. And where there is currency, there is temptation. READ MORE Perhaps it is time to abandon the binary of truth and falsehood in favour of something more honest: a recognition that narrative, even in memoir, is construction. This is not to excuse fabrication, but to question our often naive appetite for the unvarnished self. The unreliable author, like the unreliable narrator, may be less a fraud than a mirror, showing us not who they are, but what we want them to be.
Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Salt Path scandal: the juiciest literary scams, from James Frey to JT LeRoy
Ever feel like you've been had? Readers of Raynor Winn's bestseller The Salt Path are smarting after the author was accused at the weekend of weaving a tissue of whoppers into her story. This redemptive, heart-warming memoir about Winn and her husband, Moth, is facing allegations that lots of it was made up — including the couple's names. People expect memoirs to be truthful, especially when they carry a big emotional payload — and even though we all know there's no such thing as the whole truth. But some literary fraudsters are more notorious than others. Here are some of the worst — and the best. If literary history has taught writers one thing, it's don't mess with Oprah Winfrey. Frey wrote a sentimental memoir, A Million Little Pieces (2003), about his (real) drug addiction, which turned out to be extravagantly exaggerated in every direction. Maybe we should have been alerted by the fact that he says in the book 'lying became part of my life'. Winfrey, who had chosen his memoir for her book club, was not happy. 'You betrayed millions of readers,' she scolded him on TV. In those more innocent times the deception was headline news and Frey was contrite, at least to begin with. But you can't keep a rascal down and Frey continued to publish books, even if there was no evidence he could actually write. 'Remarkably boring … the language is dead,' said our chief literary critic of Frey's latest bomb. Frey also set up a 'fiction factory' to help other writers to churn out commercial children's fiction and these days takes a high-minded view of his earlier fraud. 'When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it valid?' he asks. Well, in an age where fake news is not just accepted but cheerfully promulgated by some of the most powerful men in the world, perhaps Frey was just ahead of his rating: 10/10. The guv'nor. Utterly shameless. Somebody stop him! Early in the 21st century two slim volumes of fiction appeared — a novel, Sarah, and collection of stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things — which purported to be autobiographical tales featuring all the lip-smacking stuff of misery memoirs: abuse, prostitution, abduction, the lot. They were lapped up by readers and critics, and the author JT LeRoy — a former rent boy and drug addict — became a cult figure, even writing for this newspaper. However, LeRoy was publicity shy and only appeared in public disguised with sunglasses and a blond fright wig that made Andy Warhol's look understated. Under the wig, it turned out, was the younger sister-in-law of the real author of LeRoy's books: the American author Laura Albert, who rightly surmised that a transgressive teen would get more attention than a middle-aged woman. Initially she tried to argue that JT LeRoy was a character living inside her but the game was up. We could give Albert credit for stopping when the deceit was discovered but the work was so closely linked to the persona that a Frey-like renaissance was never rating: 8/10. Almost a work of performance art. Sneaking admiration. • I'm devastated by the Salt Path 'lies'. It meant so much to me In 1943 an Australian literary magazine thought it had discovered a previously unknown modernist master of poetry. Poems by the late Ern Malley were sent to them by his sister Ethel, who'd been clearing out after his death. The poems were … intense, full of meaningless phrases like 'my omphagic ear' and 'the black swan of trespass' that, if it were done today, you'd assume were the output of ChatGPT after too much coffee. Some of the verse was obviously a joke ('he/ who has caparisoned a nun dies/ with his Twankydillo at the ready') but the mag lapped it up. Later the editors were fined for publishing obscene material, which implies that someone actually understood what the poems meant. But as the critic Robert Hughes pointed out, 'Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived'. His poems had all been written in an afternoon by two young army men, Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The only people happier than the editors who discovered Ern Malley were the editors who discovered the rating: 7/10. So obviously nonsense yet they got away with it — for a while. Who wouldn't love to see a private letter from a famous wit like Dorothy Parker or Noël Coward? For a while in the 1990s, the American biographer Lee Israel made it possible: she forged letters from writers, giving people a bit of juice (Coward, in one, complained about Julie Andrews's teeth), then sold them to memorabilia dealers — more than 400 times. Like JT LeRoy's creator, Israel was a frustrated writer and figured out a way to get people to actually read what she wrote. The problem was that if people took it seriously when they were duped by a book, it became really personal when they were fooled by a fake letter. Israel was unrepentant: the fake letters were 'larky and fun and totally cool'. The courts disagreed: Israel was prosecuted for the money she fraudulently made from the sale of the letters, and narrowly escaped prison. Where anyone else might have laid low and adopted a new career in underwater basket-weaving, Israel instead 'did a Frey' and published a rebarbative, entirely unapologetic memoir about the affair in 2008, which became a hit film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy. Which shows that if there's one thing that unites such fraudsters, it's not knowing when to stop. (The correct answer is 'just before you start'.)Pinocchio rating: 6/10. Credit given for sheer energy and range. Gore Vidal called it 'a moving account of an artist too well understood by his time'. For David Bowie it was a 'quiet and moving monograph'. In 1998 William Boyd's illustrated biography of the rediscovered New York artist Nat Tate, launched at Jeff Koons's studio on April 1, was a sensation — and it was all a big fib. Vidal and Bowie were in on the joke. Boyd, who likes nothing better than creating a whole life from nothing, invented an artist, wrote his biography, stuffed the book with plausible photos and even sold one of Tate's paintings at auction — to Anthony McPartlin from Ant and Dec. (The proceeds went to charity.) And Boyd fans may recognise one of Nat Tate's friends, whose photograph appears in the book: it is the legendary Logan Mountstuart, who would go on to star in Boyd's next novel, Any Human rating: 2/10. Not so much a scam as a brilliant benevolent wheeze. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List The actor David Niven is loved as much now for his series of memoirs as for his films. The books, starting with The Moon's a Balloon, are so full of perfect anecdotes that, as our reviewer put it, 'the stories are too perfect, too rounded, not to have been seriously embellished' — and documents released in 2002 put into question Niven's army career as presented in his book. But his reputation is undimmed, probably because these things matter less when the writing is so good and when the story tells us some deeper truth. The same goes for the Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who, as Neal Ascherson put it, 'was capable of inventing to make the truth even truer'. We tend to forgive these writers, just as Clive James did when he discovered that his beloved Italian essayist Eugenio Montale had got assistants to write many of his book reviews and split the payment. James was unperturbed: all he had discovered, he wrote, 'was that the demigod was a human being all along'.Pinocchio rating: 0/10. We forgive genius anything.
Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
America's literary bad boy is back: ‘I want to burn the world down'
The literary outlaw James Frey rose before a roaring, whooping crowd, and strode to the microphone. Then he gave us all two middle fingers, like a punk rocker from an age before most of his audience were born. Twenty years ago, Frey was perhaps the most famous writer in America. In his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, he portrayed himself as a charismatic crack addict wanted by the police, battling his demons in a smart rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. Oprah Winfrey adored it and picked it for her book club in September of 2005, propelling it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks. A few months later, an investigative website turned up police records that challenged parts of the story in the memoir and its sequel. Frey had not spent three months in jail; he had been in custody for a couple of hours in relation to a couple of driving tickets. Winfrey summoned him on to her talk show and declared he had not only duped her but betrayed 'millions of readers'. This was, at the time, treated as the gravest publishing scandal of the millennium. Frey's publisher offered refunds, a film based on the book was cancelled, his agent dropped him and Frey was hurled, unceremoniously, out of polite society. He fled to France for a spell to escape the paparazzi, and later, to darkest Connecticut. Now he is back. 'What's up New York!' he cried at the launch party for his new novel, Next to Heaven. 'It's good to f***ing be here!' Dressed in a loose black T-shirt, black slacks with a pair of thick-framed glasses pushed back on to his forehead, he arrived at the mic to booming rock music. He then placed his book between his thighs and held it there, so he could raise both his arms for the middle fingers. He looked like Johnny Rotten in a yoga pose. 'I haven't done this in a long time,' said Frey (pronounced 'fry'), once the music and the shouting had died down. 'I'm a deeply solitary introvert who lives in a black house at the end of a dead-end road in the f***ing woods. I don't come out often to play or to start fires — to raise hell — but I'm here to do all those f***ing things!' During his years in the wilderness, Frey, now 55, founded his own company, Full Fathom Five, that managed a crew of young writers turning out young-adult science fiction novels. He sold it to a French billionaire and for a while he was chief executive of a video game company. Both of these pursuits allowed him to live in a large house in Connecticut with a Mercedes and a souped-up Porsche in the driveway. He also managed, exile or no, to carry on selling millions of books. One of them, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, in which Christ comes again, this time as a bisexual in New York City, was published by Larry Gagosian's gallery, in a limited edition, as a work of art. His latest, Next to Heaven,features sex parties and murder among the super-rich in a town that sounds an awful lot like New Canaan, Connecticut, disguised as 'New Bethlehem'. It is published by Authors Equity, an independent publishing company founded by Madeline McIntosh, the former chief executive of Penguin Random House, with two other big names from the industry. 'It's a new company funded by some women who thought that publishing was broken,' Frey told the crowd at his launch party, before reading what he described as 'some dirty shit' from the book. The publishers 'took a risk with me and I took a risk with them,' he said. 'I have never worked with an American publisher who didn't go into this with me scared. They were always scared. We never know what is going to come but we know something will.' McIntosh, for her part, insisted she was quite comfortable working with a hellraiser. Frey 'lives slightly on the edge', she told me. 'He doesn't want to play it safe. He wants to actually rock and roll, so to speak, and that's kind of the spirit of what we are interested in.' The actual rocking and rolling was now happening in a large, white cube art gallery in Chelsea. The event was sold out. The former head of Penguin Random House stood at the door, checking in young writers, poets and tech workers, a woman who makes a living as a rope artist, a 'pleasure educator' wearing a brown suede suit and a crop top, and at least one of the Real Housewives of New York City. Some of Frey's neighbours — smart, middle-aged folks in shirts and blazers — had come down from Connecticut. The actress Gina Gershon, who was in Cocktail and Showgirls, was there because she is a friend of Frey's and because she is the voice on the audiobook for Next to Heaven. When Frey asked her to do it, 'I said: 'Let me read it first,'' she told me. 'I thought it was so fun … It reminded me of sneaking in to my mom's room when I was little and reading her naughty Danielle Steel novels.' Looking around the room, I estimated about half of the 100-strong crowd must have been in primary school when the Million Little Pieces controversy exploded. 'Young kids like him, meaning people in their twenties,' said Matt Weinberger, a 26-year-old writer and photographer. 'He's able to embody this rock-star personality of a writer that we might associate with an older writer, with old New York, the Greenwich Village writers. That spirit is once again alive and well.' Callie Monroe, 30, who works in tech, admitted that the original scandal had passed her by when she was ten. 'I'm intrigued to read the book that started it all,' she said. She added she had come because she had heard Frey's recent appearance on the pop-culture podcast How Long Gone, in which he railed entertainingly against the literary establishment that had disowned him. 'I still see literature dying,' Frey said on the podcast. 'I see serious reading dying. And I see nobody doing anything to try to stop it, right? And it's not like I'm some grand f***ing crusader, but I love books, I love reading, I love writing. I think it's important. And it's becoming classical music, right? This very small thing that is loved by a small amount of people.' Most writers are too timid, he said, whereas he likes to write as if he's doing 150 miles an hour in his Porsche. 'When you … drive a car very, very fast on a public road, and when I say 'very fast' I'm talking very fast, it requires that same hyperfocus,' he said. 'It requires that same absolute fever dream of a state [where] if you make a mistake in a car at 150 miles an hour you die. And that's the sort of hyperfocus state I enter into when I write.' He writes to rock music, he said. 'When I'm writing about rage, I listen to rage-filled music. When I'm writing about sadness, I listen to sad music… I have to feel what I'm writing about when I write it,' he said. 'For rage, it could be Black Sabbath, early, early Black Sabbath. It could be Sex Pistols … [or Led] Zeppelin, or Guns N' Roses, Black Flag, all the punk from the Eighties, right? Like, music that makes me want to fight.' The goal is always 'to overwhelm a reader with story and unconventional application of words and grammar to make you feel things really deeply, to thrill you, to scare you, to turn you on, to make you feel hate, to make you feel rage'. In his opinion, most writers do not do this. 'I think writers today are mostly cowards,' he said on the podcast. 'They write books for awards and professorships. They don't write books to make great art. They don't write books to rock the world. They don't write books to keep literature alive. They write books for a hug and for an award.' But Frey wants neither a Pulitzer nor a hug. 'I want to burn the f***ing world down,' he said. 'I want to light it up. I want to force people to read things and think and feel and change and talk and believe that literature can still be great, that literature can still be transformative, that words still have power, that stories still have power.' It is hard to dispute the force of a Frey story. Clutching his new novel at the launch party, Michelle Moray, 59, who works in IT, said she could still recall reading A Million Little Pieces and its sequel My Friend Leonard, an account of Frey spending 87 days in jail. The Smoking Gun website went looking for Frey's mugshot and discovered he actually received a few traffic tickets and a misdemeanour summons, and spent only a couple of hours in the slammer. 'One of my friends was very upset when she found out it wasn't truly real,' Moray said. But 'I didn't care. I loved both of those books. Who gives a shit? The guy's a great writer.' The great scandal now seems small and far away. Cliff Wallach, 57, an old friend of Frey's, said that 'when it got called out that it was embellished, I was like: well, OK, maybe in a couple of places but a lot of it was real'. It matched what he knew of Frey. 'It was very much his voice,' he said. (True to form, Frey's latest book hasn't escaped controversy; some readers are dinging the novel on Goodreads over rumours — denied by Frey — that he used AI to help write it.) • The Times review: Corny, clichéd, lazy — James Frey's eat-the-rich novel is cynical tosh And though his debut memoir was all but blacklisted, it prompted a boom in autofiction — the genre that blends autobiography and fiction — practised most unapologetically by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in his six-volume series of novel-like memoirs titled My Struggle. 'The alt-lit scene in New York right now is so incredible,' Weinberger said. And now the man who started it all is back. Though he does not crave a warm embrace from the public, he got several anyway from fans who formed a long queue at the book-signing table. Did he feel like the prodigal son, I asked, stopping him between hugs and handshakes. 'People like to say that but it's not like I ever stopped, man,' he said, with a frown and a turn of his head. 'I didn't sell 30 million books in one year. I did it over 25 years.' He paused for a moment and turned towards me. 'There is an old story about some thing … that Ernest Hemingway passed to Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer passed to me,' he said. I stood waiting to hear what it was. A torch of some sort? A great truth about writing? He did not say, but lent in closer, looking me in the eye. 'I'm back to claim that thing.'
Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Corny, clichéd, lazy — James Frey's eat-the-rich novel is cynical tosh
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, although he swears blind he didn't use AI to write it. OK, he conceded to Vanity Fair magazine that he used ChatGPT to help with brand names; and it's impossible to avoid Google's AI these days. But on the creativity point he defended his integrity emphatically: 'I don't use generative AI to write ever, just so we're clear,' he said. I suppose we'll just have to take the author of A Million Little Pieces (2003) at his word. 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 ('Cum inside me. Cum inside me. Cum inside me'), seems unlikely to have been born from any native feminist instinct. Then, like the recent TV drama Your Friends and Neighbors starring Jon Hamm, it features a Connecticut fund manager who gets fired, can't bring himself to tell his family and maintains his lavish lifestyle by pinching Patek Philippe watches from his neighbours. But, whatever. Aren't all these eat-the-rich stories about sex, divorce and murder merging into one anyway? And isn't shamelessness the quality Frey, 55, is best known for? He claims he dreamt of becoming 'the most controversial writer on the planet' — not the best, the most controversial. He shot to fame after his drugs memoir A Million Little Pieces was championed by Oprah Winfrey. It then emerged that he had invented large chunks of it. It brought controversy, a South Park parody, millions of sales and precisely zero contrition (as one of the characters in Next to Heaven thinks after she has duped everyone: 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.') 'I grew up with a f*** you attitude,' this maverick has said in interviews, a phrase he puts in the mouth of many of his risk-taking, self-destructive characters. 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 centres on a drug-fuelled sex party dreamt up by Devon and Belle, the richest two wives in chichi New Bethlehem (a name taken from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood). Devon, an art dealer who comes from old money, is looking to escape her marriage of convenience to Billy, a sadistic bitcoin billionaire with a portrait of Eric Trump on the wall. Belle, who hails from a family of rich criminals in Texas, lives in a property that's 'staffed the f*** up' with nannies, housekeepers and stable hands. Her gentle husband, Teddy, is impotent — unable to achieve 'a coconut-cream explosion'. • What we're reading this week — by the Times books team Devon craves sex with Alex, a former NFL quarterback who has lost his banking job but hasn't told his wholesome wife, Grace. Meanwhile, Belle wants to bed Charlie, a hockey coach, who is dating Katy, a maths teacher with a tragic backstory. All the women are beautiful with olive skin. Devon's beloved housekeeper, Ana, has particularly beautiful olive skin and must sleep with her boss to send money back to her husband and child in Costa Rica. So all the ingredients are here for another titillating tale of rape and retribution among the 1-per-centers complete with Chanel dresses, Boca do Lobo sofas, limited-edition Yeezys, Ode à la Rose orchids, Roche Bobois chairs etc. Next to Heaven confirms that Frey is a very, very lazy writer. His sentences read like schoolboy attempts at hardboiled style — 'He had it all. And he had always had it all' — and contain some of the corniest lines I've read in fiction ('promises are like glass and they break just as easily'). Then there are the parts where he takes flight: 'Oh the night! Oh the dark! Where promises are made and kisses exchanged, where secrets are born and shared, where hearts entwine and passions ignite.' 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. After one paragraph in which the men all size each other up, the characters slope off to have very tame (or depressing) heterosexual intercourse. James, goddammit, it's an orgy! He takes more care describing the party invitations. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List 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. It's also coming to a TV near you because Frey sold the screen rights before the manuscript — 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.'Next to Heaven by James Frey (Swift £18.99 pp336). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. 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