The author page of “Next to Heaven,” James Frey’s new novel, breathlessly notes that Frey “was called America’s Most Notorious Author by Time Magazine and the Bad Boy of American Literature by The New York Times.” The copy does not discuss where this reputation came from—cigarettes? Motorcycles? You imagine Frey holding up a liquor store while delivering some close-to-the-bone truth about contemporary life that no one wants to admit.

But, of course, Frey’s offense was less glamorous than that. In 2006, he got caught for having fabricated parts of his addiction memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” in the hopes of making his life seem more cinematic and intense. (In that respect, at least, the source of his infamy—a tendency to self-mythologize—can be found on his new author page.) Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club, dressed Frey down on national television. He kept writing but largely withdrew from the public eye for a couple of decades, amassing a fortune as the founder of a book-packaging outfit, and then as the C.E.O. of a video-game company. Now Frey has rebranded himself as an early victim of cancel culture and seeks redemption in a media environment that he believes has finally caught up to him and his adventures on the post-truth frontier.

Frey in comeback mode continues to blur the line between fantasy and reality, but he’s also learned from his experience. “Next to Heaven” is being marketed as fiction, even as Frey has teased that other people are saying that parts of it are drawn from his life in New Canaan, Connecticut. “I was working in autofiction before that word existed,” he told the Times, in a lengthy profile. To Vanity Fair, he said, “If I’m published as memoir or nonfiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what’s not true. And if I publish it as fiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what is. I sit in the middle and say, ‘I wrote a book. I hope you dig it.’ ”

Is “Next to Heaven” autofiction? No, it’s a straightforwardly plotted thriller about a group of stratospherically wealthy finance types and their wives behaving badly in the fictional town of New Bethlehem, “as beautiful and safe and perfect a town as exists anywhere in the world.” Is it, for lack of a better term, cancelled-guy fiction, animated by resentment at being misunderstood? That’s a tougher call. Frey wasn’t cancelled for abusing women or being a sex pest—just for embellishing his life—but he appears to identify with the #MeToo discontents and to have adopted the gender politics and postures of that tribe. So the book is provocative in a familiar way. “She didn’t like to admit it, because in today’s world women were supposed to be ambitious and want careers, to be feminists, and to want to be strong and independent, but all she ever wanted, her life’s great dream, was to be a wife and to be a mother,” he writes. Also: “He would be an AFL, an Asskicker for Life. A Great White Shark. A Silverback. An Alpha among Alphas. Nobody would ever fuck with him.”

The plot centers on a swingers’ party organized by Devon, the bored and “stunningly gorgeous” wife of a bullying hedge-fund titan, and her friend Belle, a “Texas debutante” whose husband, known as the Closer for his prowess in private equity, is struggling with erectile dysfunction. The soirée sets off a chain of further intrigues and, toward the end of the novel, Alex, a former football star who is too ashamed to tell his wife that he has lost his trading job, is discovered on his couch with his pants down and a plastic bag duct-taped over his face. Frey, who likes to belabor his points until the carcass of the horse has actually disintegrated, writes:

Somebody wanted Alexander the Great to be remembered as Alexander the Dead and Humiliated.

It was someone who knew him.

Who wanted him not just dead, but humiliated.

I have wrestled with a Frey-like dread through the writing of this review—I’m afraid that I’ll describe his book and no one will believe me. The two main characters, Devon and her husband, Billy, are a swarm of status signifiers stuffed ungrammatically into a Burberry trench coat. Billy “had gone to Exeter on a full ride and graduated at sixteen. From there he went to the Wharton joint undergrad/MBA program on a full ride and graduated at twenty. He immediately went to work at Goldman, who had started recruiting him when he was seventeen, and became the second-youngest partner in the bank’s history at twenty-four. At twenty-five, he was making twenty million dollars a year. He left Goldman at twenty-eight and started his own hedge fund. It was a spectacular success. . . .” Meanwhile, Devon “had grown up in Greenwich on an estate called Willowvale. . . . Devon’s ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower. . . . She had gone to Greenwich Academy, one of the best girls’ schools in the country, for nursery, elementary, and middle school. After GA, she went to boarding school at Miss Porter’s, whose notable alumnae include Laura Rockefeller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lilly Pulitzer, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Agnes Gund. After Porter’s, she went to Princeton and was a member of The Ivy, its most prestigious dining club. . . .”

The whole book is like this. On the walls of Billy and Devon’s house are “paintings by Picasso, Warhol, Lichtenstein, De Kooning, Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Basquiat, Cecily Brown, Mark Grotjahn.” Their house has “a movie theater. A home gym. A yoga studio . . . a game room filled with vintage video games and pinball machines . . . ” In her bathroom, replete with “black-veined Calacatta marble counters,” Devon applies “La Prairie and Orogold creams and beauty products, Azature nail polish, Jean Patou Joy perfume,” and her “pale-pink Chanel spaghetti-strap dress” hangs on “her taut body, skin soft and tan and glowing, sun-streaked hair falling over her shoulders, deep shining blue eyes offset by the dress and the skin and hair.” Frey named Bret Easton Ellis as one of his inspirations for “Next to Heaven,” and surely the collapse of foreground and background here is intentional. The woman, the countertops, the clothes, and the jewels are all one fetish object, one undifferentiated fantasy.

To give credit to Frey where it’s due, his prose can be endearingly excitable. At the swingers’ soirée, he writes, “Conversation was flowing, everyone was awed by the house, by the land, by how the house and the land existed together, complimented each other, danced and sang and laughed with each other.” Just as often, though, he gets too excited. His evocation of a woman’s grief sounds like it was ripped from a B.D.S.M. personals ad: “Maximum heat. Maximum pain. Maximum impact.” Single-sentence paragraphs, at their worst, suggest that he’s experiencing a kind of cognitive paper jam. The preparations for the sex party are recounted in lascivious detail. We’re apprised of a care package delivered to each room, a black box “lined with black satin” and containing “condoms in multiple sizes, lube in multiple flavors, a small vibrator, a larger one, a blindfold, restraints for the wrists, restraints for the ankles.” Frey spends pages on his characters’ anticipation of the big night, especially the wives’. As with the endless descriptions of luxury goods and social-professional triumphs, the book can seem to lose itself in prolonging a fantasy that doesn’t include the reader.

It’s tempting to imagine that the author’s caressing treatment of so much wealth and hotness and success is, in fact, a slap. Maybe Frey is mocking materialism? But if lines like “They got married at the Dallas Country Club in front of eight hundred guests in what Texas magazine called the Wedding of the Decade” are meant critically, it’s hard to know what, exactly, they’re criticizing. Does Frey intend to take aim at the emptiness of money and status as metrics for the good life, for human flourishing? If that’s the case, the book’s obsession with niche signifiers is so extreme that he seems to be targeting no one but himself. Likewise, the intensely retrograde gender politics—and the text’s out-of-control, onanistic eroticism—seem fairly personal and specific. As satire, “Next to Heaven” is unintelligible, as though someone is universalizing their own hangups and then skewering them for clout.