THE THIRTEENTH STEP.(Book Review)

It's one thing merely to ruin your life; to turn it into a mangled, fuming heap of wreckage requires something special--a taste for the theatrical. In fact, part of the genius of the Twelve Step recovery program lies in its ritualized center-stage confessionals, which provide assurance that sobriety need not prevent you from making a spectacle of yourself. But, now that such performances have become routine, what can a high-wattage, drug-addled drama queen like James Frey do to stand out in the crowd?

Frey begins his new memoir, "A Million Little Pieces"(Nan Talese/Doubleday; $22.95), with an account of waking up on an airplane, at the age of twenty-three, with a broken nose, a hole in his cheek large enough to accommodate a finger, two black eyes, his clothes "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood,"his four front teeth knocked out, no idea where he's going, and no memory of how he got there. His stricken parents meet him at the airport and whisk him off to a high-end treatment center in Minnesota.

Once at the center, Frey proceeds to prove himself better, or at least more profligate, than the average drunk. He astonishes a resident physician, who has "never seen so much and such extensive damage in someone so young."He vomits up "blood and bile and chunks of my stomach"a couple of times a day. He faces down menacing fellow-patients who are reduced to gibbering terror by his capacity for violent rage. He impresses a burly dentist when he endures two root canals without benefit of anesthesia. He befriends the toughest guys in his unit and, in particular, earns the fatherly protection of two other recovering addicts, a Las Vegas mobster and a federal-appeals-court judge. He finds true love with Lilly, a female patient, in romantic defiance of the center's intolerable "Rules or Regulations,"and storms through a crack house to rescue her when their affair forces her to leave.

But Frey's most attention-grabbing move is his utter rejection of the Twelve Step approach, despite the fact that every staff member at the center insists that "A.A. and the Twelve Steps are the only real options"for anyone who wants to stay clean. Frey will have none of A.A.'s crypto-religious talk of a "Higher Power."Instead, he weds himself to a regi-men of Nietzschean self-reliance: "I don't accept excuses for failure or deflect what is essentially a problem I have caused. . . . Every time I want to drink or do drugs, I'm going to make the decision not to do them. I'll keep making that decision until it's no longer a decision, but a way of life.”

This is the Dirty Harry model of recovery, and the cinematic quality of some of Frey's exploits makes you wonder whether the facts in this memoir have been enhanced. What's genuine is the propulsive energy the book shares with earlier chronicles of overgrown-adolescent angst and misbehavior, like Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir "Prozac Nation"or Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Fight Club."Although, like Wurtzel, Frey writes about events that happened when he was no longer a teen-ager, conventional wisdom has it that the emotional development of an addict remains stalled at the age he started using. Frey--who began ...