"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller

Awesome Writer John Frey

John Frey took a beating from Oprah for categorizing his novel, A Million Little Pieces, as an autobiography, when actually, it was not. As I watched the show when he got the beaten, I cringed because Oprah, nor anyone else, ever acknowledge that A Million Little Pieces was a down right excellent book.

John Frey used his writing skills to draw the reader in. I was captivated from the first page until the last page. The story was so compelling, and I empathized with the main character right away. For the record, I must give John Frey credit for being a darn good writer.

I am always fascinated to know what inspires such a great writer like John Frey. Once I figure out the books that inspire great writers, I usually try and read some of those books. This may seem a bit bizarre, but I figure that good writers must know good writing, so I trust their judgement and follow their lead.

When James Frey was recently on Oprah, he talked about a book that inspired him to want to write. He stated that the author did not follow any rules, and the author did what he wanted to do with his writing. The author was Henry Miller and the novel was Tropic of Cancer. If you have been reading my blog, you know that I downloaded Tropic of Cancer as soon as John Frey mentioned it.

Miller has many detailed sex accounts in this novel, he tells lot of in depth stories about seemingly random people and the narrator, whom I suppose is himself, and he switches from present to past tense quite often. Also, like other great writers, such as Toni Morrison, he uses stream-of-consciousness quite often. Now, many readers have a difficult time with stream-of-consciousness. For those of you who do not know, stream-of consciousness is when the author writes a persons' thought as he is having them. So, just think about how many thoughts you can have in one minute and how random they can be. That's stream-of-consciousness.

So, for a novel to include lots of random sex, random characters, switch from present to past tense quite often, use stream-of-consciousness and still keep the reader interested, I would say that the novel is pretty good.

I am convinced that these type of books make a person smarter because of the higher level skills that are needed to gain the meaning of the text.

After reading this novel, I felt that I understood James Frey a little bit more; he wants to do his own thing, and I don't have a problem with that as long as he labels his work properly.

Thanks to James Frey for the great recommendation.

Henry Miller