By: Frederick Exley Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 400 Publication Date: August 12, 1988 Release Date: August 12, 1988
Product Description: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.
Amazon.com Review: Frederick Exley recounts his life as the son of a hero-worshipped high school athlete who is doomed to be a spectator not only of sports, but of life. From irresponsible drifter, to dreamer of impossible dreams, to drunkard, to frequent patient at an insane asylum, Exley carried baggage from his childhood through much of his adult life, never feeling he could escape the dark cloud of expectation that hung over him. When Frank Gifford, former New York Giants backfield star, is injured, Exley is jolted into painful realizations about his life, and a confession.
A Brilliant, Tragic Novel Base On Life This is an autobiographical novel that is even more autobiographical than many people realize. Frederick Exley was truly a "one book author," who could only write variations on the same theme in later years. This is a brilliant, tragic book, exquisitely written and sharply observed.
My favorite novel Re-reading this for the first time in 20 years, I'm struck again by how funny Exley was as a writer. His use of quotation marks around single words to denote absurdity cracks me up. The trilogy, of which this is the first book, is well worth the time, though this one is the best. The chapter on Mr. Blue, the siding salesman, is the highlight, perhaps. I thought Exley was great way back when, and I'm delighted that I still think so.
For Something Completely Different... A Fan's Notes is quite different from anything that I've ever read before. Those who want to escape "the usual" should give A Fan's Notes a try.
Fred Exley uses A Fan's Notes to recount his turbulent life; Exley's work is "faction" - mostly fact, but he gives himself some wiggle room by calling it "a fictional memoir."
A Fan's Notes examines Exley's failures for almost 400 pages. Exley started life with some promise; he graduated from the University of Southern California and seemed poised for a prosperous life in advertising. But bad choices, alcoholism, mental illness, and a pompous attitude pushed him to society's fringes.
Given all of the misery recounted in its pages, what redeems A Fan's Notes? Exley recounts his life without flinching; Exley's unwillingness to "spin" his life story in a way that portrays him more favorably sets A Fan's Notes apart. This provides Exley with a measure of redemption.
The other redeeming aspect of A Fan's Notes is that it contains not a little philosophy and insight into "the human condition." Consider Exley's lengthy digressions about football. From his boyhood days in Watertown, New York, Exley admired his father, who was a local football hero. As an adult, Exley came to admire Frank Gifford, when Gifford played first at USC and then with the New York Giants. Exley admits that -similar to his father and Gifford - he always sought some way of standing apart from the crowd; but all of his efforts ended in failure. In a heartbreaking line, he finally admits, "...I understood and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny... to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan" (p. 357). Ironically enough, it was Exley's account of his failures in A Fan's Notes that finally gave him the fanfare he craved.
In the end, A Fan's Notes will be worth it to those readers who, in order to expand their horizons, can stomach reading about one man's self-inflicted tragedies. I recommend A Fan's Notes.
Seriously Overrated In spots, Exley shows that he can hold a reader's attention. The narrative about Paddy the Duke, for example, builds to a nice tense moment, with the inmates in an asylum unifying in their dislike of the independent Paddy, who wins at ping pong (and life) despite a mediocre and uneducated style.
But such moments of narrative success are overwhelmed by shortcomings in this seriously flawed book. Among the more blatant is the protagonist Fred Exley, who ranges from superior and domineering to weak and inept. While always egotistical, this character doesn't read as the same person from chapter to chapter. Here, the author Exley is not simply creating an unreliable narrator; instead, he is creating a character who is psychologically inconsistent.
In HUMBOLDT'S GIFT, Saul Bellow created the poet Humboldt Von Fleisher, who had a huge personality that included many admirable virtues as well as their opposites. In A FAN'S NOTES, Exley also seems to go for range. But it's beyond him.
Another problem with this novel is the sometimes terrible writing. For example:
o On my first breathless vision of her, I wanted to bury my teeth, Dracula-like, into her flanks, knowing she would bleed pure butterscotch.
o She was the girl next door who only yesterday ran around the yard with pee in her pants.
o When he finally fell silent, the stillness was of that horrified kind that follows a fart in a Methodist church.
Finally, I'd say that Exley is trapped by the dated social assumptions of his protagonist. Read A FAN'S NOTES and step back in time to the late Fifties and sample the attitude of a real white American man toward "Swishes, Negroes, and Girls." The problem with this stuff is that Exley presents these social assumptions as insights. A more skilled author (such as Richard Yates in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD) would have shown how this then conventional outlook limited or harmed a character. This would be the cause of character's tragedy, not his glory.
I'm sorry Frederick Exley had such a hard life. But this is a seriously overrated book.
He left his capacity for hoping at P. J. Clarke's Damaged life cannot be lived rightly. Exley threw himself at crummy jobs and airhead blondes with unrequited passion in an administered world. He had in fact the misfortune to love life in an America of pompous men in grey flannel suits who didn't, and who created, with their little advertising jingles ("that's the way the missile goes, pop goes the world") a world of Manufactured Consent that created the mess in Iraq in our time, and Vietnam in Ex's.
Ex violated rule one: white males, the supposed beneficiaries of a rotten system, are never to complain when the heart attack machine is strapped to their bodies (and then the kerosene).
Ex knew what people went to bars for. They didn't go because they were connie-sewers of fine wines. No, they were prey to the desparate isolation and anhedonia, the complete and utter isolation of an American life. He scandalized the pompous Yuppies of his day with his honesty.
However, it wasn't self-applied, and this was his tragedy.
The book doesn't glamorize an alcoholic's life, any more than Bukowski did in Barfly. It's not as if Ex mounted any sort of rebellion against an America given over to folly. He couldn't get to the admission that while it might be true that America was a nightmare and a Moronic Inferno, he, as a product, might be like his brother in law consuming himself with hate, and self-hate.
Pompous jerks of course act as if "looking at yourself in the mirror" is in a zero-sum game with your lousy attitude (about graduating from UCLA and becoming at best a flack for a railroad): as if what you see will make America a city on a hill. But if you are the product of America, well, that's a comment on the rottenness of a system.
Frederick Exley has long been released from the wheel of fire on which he spent most of his life, and his tears no longer scald like molten lead.
May he rest in peace, and eternal light shine upon him. Let him into Heaven, G-d, he's served his time in Hell. I pay him the "abundant tribute of my tears" for he did so for men no one else could love, who lived on grilled cheese sandwiches and beer and usually concluded a night in the bar with a sucker punch, directed at some pompous a-hole who deserved it.
It was a harsh sentence for Ex to see into what Eliot called "the heart of light: the silence" in the middle of Marshall Field's, following a girl around, shopping. There is a cognitive dissonance in being human, on a Shakespearean scale as was Ex, outside crappy little book-clubs at Border's, at Barnes and Noble, or, Ex's Chicago-Onhava, Kroch's and Brentano's...where in my experience the art section was run by one of those Last Men on Earth, a man who loved life so much that he smoked away the pain of life-in-death and died.
Divided men in other words discuss in such refined tones the entrails of writers like Fitzgerald and Exley and as quickly forget when the book discussion club breaks up, or the PhD dissertation is complete.
To be Wisdom, to cry aloud in the American street, is to be unheard, especially if you don't take care of your own butt first as Exley did not.
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