Saul Bellow came up with the term “reality instructor” for the kind of self-important, tough-talking, wised-up guy who devotes his life to wising up other people. The ineffectual intellectual heroes of Bellow’s fiction are constantly having their lapels grabbed, figuratively and literally, by such tutors in toughness — gangsters, operators, money men — who can’t stand the sight of a dreamer, an idealist, someone who just doesn’t get it.

In “Humboldt’s Gift,” for instance, the narrator, Charlie Citrine, runs afoul of a petty gangster named Rinaldo Cantabile, who destroys Citrine’s Mercedes in a dispute over a minor gambling debt. When Citrine tries to reason with Cantabile — “Let’s be sensible,” he pleads — the thug explodes in rage: “You’ve written all that stuff. You’re in Who’s Who. But you dumb a—— you don’t understand anything.”

What Bellow makes clear is that the Cantabiles of the world are not just contemptuous of the Citrines: They are threatened by them. When a man’s sense of himself is bound up with his conviction that he has the world figured out — that he has mastered the rules of life’s brutal, unforgiving game — it is intolerable to discover that other men are playing in a different game, with other, less material rules. Cantabile and his kind become reality instructors out of wounded vanity, which is why their efforts at instruction are so insistent and brutal. Only when Cantabile has convinced Citrine that the world really is murderous can he regain his self-esteem; and the best way to convince Citrine of this fact is to make it a fact, by threatening to murder him.

But in Bellow’s work, the reality instructors are always shown to be deficient in precisely the sense of reality they brag about. For it is always obvious to the reader that Citrine — and Moses Herzog, and Tommy Wilhelm, and Augie March — see further into reality than their tormentors. Bellow’s narrators recognize that beauty, truth, and goodness are just as real as power and violence; they refuse to succumb to the reductive, brutalized vision which holds that man is always a wolf to man, so you had better bite first when you have the chance. Citrine may lose his car, just as Herzog loses his wife and Wilhelm loses everything, but they all triumph by remaining more sensitive and expressive — that is, more open to reality — than their would-be teachers.

“Bright Shiny Morning” (Harper, 502 pages, $26.95), the new novel by James Frey, is a fascinating example of what happens when the Bellovian equation is reversed — when the reality instructor is not defeated by the novelist’s imagination, because the novelist is himself one of the tough guys, or thinks he is. Open Mr. Frey’s book to almost any page, and you will be confronted with the hectoring drone of someone telling it like it is. There is Casey, the closeted lesbian movie-star wife of a closeted gay movie star, who lectures the man her husband is stalking on how it is in Hollywood: “I understand your ignorance, your naivete. Let this be a lesson to you. Movie stars get what they want, when they want it because we’re the reason people pay money to go to the movies … your job is to service us.”

Then there is Shaka, the African-American golf-course manager, who lectures Dylan, the naive white teenage caddy, on how it is at the golf course: “Whatever I say goes. There ain’t no debating involved. … There ain’t no democracy, and there ain’t no revolution. The one time there tried to be a revolution, I took the revolutionator and picked him up by the back of his pants and literally tossed him in the street. That’s how it goes here. That’s the way it is.” There is even Old Man Joe, a homeless alcoholic, who wanders into a church and lectures Jesus on how it is: “Those that got, get more, and those that don’t get nothing over and over and over again. If you for real it don’t make no sense to me.”

Mr. Frey himself, of course, became famous as a reality instructor, a man who had seen it all — addiction, prison, lost love, root canals without anesthetic — and survived to tell the world how it was. As the whole world learned in 2006, however, much of Mr. Frey’s “memoir,” “A Million Little Pieces,” was fake. He had invented episodes and characters with the intention, as he later said, of making himself appear “tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was.”

This episode, which caused much hand-wringing over the ethics of the memoir form and the credulity of publishers, also offered a genuinely literary lesson. It was a living demonstration of Bellow’s insight that the reality instructors are always those with the most tenuous grasp on reality. Only those writers willing to be humbled by the real are able to capture it for literature. Writers who must always be seen to dominate reality, on the other hand, can never grasp it. Their need to appear wised-up means that they can only allow themselves to write in ways that the world already recognizes as realistic — that is, in clichés.

In the case of James Frey — a man who reportedly tattooed his arm with the letters “F.T.B.S.I.T.T.T.D.,” the initials of his motto, “F— THE BULLS– IT’S TIME TO THROW DOWN” — there is no doubt which kind of writer we are dealing with. Indeed, “A Million Little Pieces” was so thoroughly cliché-ridden, so steeped in the rhythms and conventions of Hollywood, that its inauthenticity was obvious long before the extent of Mr. Frey’s lying was exposed.

In the aftermath of the scandal, Mr. Frey even claimed that “A Million Little Pieces” had originally been shopped to publishers as a novel. It must have made a kind of sense to him and his agents, then, to return to print with a book that is explicitly a novel. The very first words to greet the reader in “Bright Shiny Morning” are a winking disclaimer: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.”

But if a memoir can lie, so can a novel, and “Bright Shiny Morning” lies relentlessly. Its lies no longer take the form of “this happened to me,” but the more abstract and perhaps more culpable form of “this is the way the world is.” So what is the world like in the Los Angeles of Mr. Frey’s novel — the setting which is all that unites its four major and many minor plotlines?

Start with Dylan, a teenager who has just arrived from the Midwest, and gets a job fixing motorcycles for a vicious biker gang. When the gang leader happens to leave his safe open, Dylan steals a stack of cash from it — money he uses to start a decent new life with his true-hearted girlfriend Maddie, who has escaped from an abusive family. Will the gang notice the theft and track Dylan down?

Then there is Amberton Parker, the closeted movie star, who is not just fantastically rich, famous, and handsome, but also “the scion of a great midwestern meatpacking family.” Amberton can have any man he wants, but he falls in love with Kevin, a young talent agent with a girlfriend, who resists his advances. When Amberton threatens to ruin Kevin’s career unless he agrees to sleep with him, the agent gives in. But it is soon discovered that Kevin has caught the star’s advances on tape, and he threatens to expose his secret life. Will Amberton hire a Russian hit man to kill the man he loves in order to save his reputation?

Even before we get to Old Man Joe, the noble bum who plots to rescue a teenage girl from her meth dealer, or Esperanza, the shy maid who falls in love with the son of her cruel employer, it is clear what we are dealing with in “Bright Shiny Morning.” These are not plots or characters but “high concepts,” the kind of bright, shiny clichés that Hollywood screenwriters use as the basis for their pitches.

And like those pitches, they rely on the recombination of ideas that are already market-tested. Mr. Frey’s Dylan-and-Maddie plot has been used in movies as long ago as “Too Late for Tears” and as recently as “No Country for Old Men.” His Amberton Parker plot rehashes familiar gossip about a couple of major movie stars (and if I were Anderson Cooper, I would demand a royalty for the name). Esperanza is a close cousin to Flor, the put-upon maid in “Spanglish.” Mr. Frey’s method of turning these familiar stereotypes into individual characters is to give them each a single cartoonish idiosyncrasy (and never more than one): Esperanza has enormous thighs; Joe will only drink Chablis and once fell in love with a girl simply because she was named Chablis.

Yet it is with these clumsy caricatures, which bear no relation at all to real human beings, that Mr. Frey means to impress the reader with his grasp of reality. For the insistent grimness of “Bright Shiny Morning,” the way all its characters’ California Dreams turn into nightmares, is supposed to be a 500-page course in reality instruction. Los Angeles, you see, is a glittering illusion, and life there is as hard as life anywhere, and the rich grind the faces of the poor, and fame doesn’t bring happiness. Even the title is ironic!

If these discoveries aren’t shattering enough, Mr. Frey has also larded the book with facts about Los Angeles, as though to ballast his lighter-than-air vision. Every few pages, he devotes an entire page to a one-paragraph factoid about L.A. history: “In 1941, Los Angeles County’s second large-scale water conveyance project, the 245-mile-long Colorado River Aqueduct, is finished,” begins a typical example. These pointless bullet points, portentously framed by white space, resemble nothing so much as the stranded nuggets of information with which Nicholson Baker attempted to construct a historical argument in “Human Smoke” — a resemblance that should bring comfort to neither writer.

Then there are the lists of names — the names of teenagers who buy assault weapons, the names of L.A. street gangs, the names (six full pages’ worth) of soldiers suffering in the city’s V.A. hospitals. These lists are white flags raised by the novelist’s surrendering imagination. The more desperately Mr. Frey thrusts facts in the reader’s face, the more obvious it is that he has no reality to offer. And because, as T.S. Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality, I am sure “Bright Shiny Morning” will be a big best-seller.

akirsch@nysun.com