A brief follow-up on Frey

The New Yorker is not so fond of Frey's new novel. From "Briefly Noted":

Two years after Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was outed as part fiction, the publicly chastened writer resurfaces with a novel much of which purports to be fact.

. . .

The characters are relentlessly stock: two lovesick kids from the heartland ("nowhere anywhere everywhere"); a bulimic, closeted movie star with a "MEGAWATT!!!!!" smile; a Mexican-American maid with an abusive employer. Frey strives for incantatory but winds up with banal; when it comes to emotion, the best he can muster is "It's deep, it's true, and it's real real real."

Maybe this reveals more about me than Frey, but I'll always take the writer with the semicolons over the writer who omits commas and overuses exclamation points (FIVE!!!!!). Unless it's Gertrude Stein. Then all bets are off. And Gertrude Stein never uses exclamation points.