He left his capacity for hoping at P. J. Clarke's

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	• A Fan's Notes Frederick Exley Vintage, 1988 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 64 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

Et lux aeterna luceat eis.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

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