Customer Reviews

A Fan's Notes

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A buddy of mine used to give a Christmas party every year that everyone eagerly looked forward to. The reason was that he, more than anyone else, would get outrageously drunk. Standing next to the keg in the garage, tipping back and forth, he would insult everyone who came near him in the vilest, most obscene terms. The rest of us stood out there laughing until our bellies hurt. The beauty of these parties was that the host's getting crazy allowed everyone else to feel a little freer to cut loose themselves. The parties ended up getting very wild and were huge fun.

I thought of this while reading A Fan's Notes, not just because the author is an unabashed, morbid alcoholic (although he is), but because he is so many other horrible things as well. In and out of insane asylums; watching soap-operas for days on end while lying on his mother's davenport, eating oreos and masturbating; tormenting his father-in-law; abandoning his wife--that this loser, this crawling degenerate, was able to put together this magnificent, hilarious, scathing piece of literature . . . well, it should give even the most unworthy of us hope that we might be able to do the same. No matter how drunk you got at the Christmas party, the host was always drunker. No matter how irrelevant you may think your life is, Mr. Exley's was way more so.

It is a fictionalized memoir, which means that basically he wrote about his life and gave himself the liberty to stretch things here and there. Don't look for a straight-forward, page-turning, sequenced plot here. It is the kind of a book where the author starts to talk about something, which reminds him of something else, which then requires him to go into a lengthy background explanation. He starts his story in the New Parrot Lounge in Watertown, New York, watching the New York Giants on TV. It isn't until page 365--twenty pages before the end of the book--that he finally gets back to this thread. But if you understand this to begin with--that you're not going into some pot-boiler--and allow yourself to be patient, you will be in for a thrilling, profound, and hugely entertaining read.

His tale begins with the story of his complex relationship with his father, a football star himself, whom young Exley adored. But his confusion and his his father's apparent dislke of him is never resolved, as his father dies at age 40. From there it's college, and drinking, and home, and drinking, and work, and drinking, and a couple of failed relationships, and drinking, the davenport, and then in and out of the insane asylum three times. His observations throughout all of this are sharp, intelligent, and often wildly funny. He drinks, he says, because he cannot tolerate the clarity of constant sobriety. He fails, he says, because he does not fit in contemporary America. He doesn't like or understand it. Indeed, he loathes it, and in truth, there is much to loathe. Films, television, omnipresent mendacity, pseudo-intellectuals; his observations are a scathing indictment of our often petty, trivial, close-minded society.

But "it," America, cannot abide him either, and when he tries to hide from it he is institutionalized. His accounts of this experience, and the electro-shock treatments and insulin therapy he is administered there, are as searing as anything I have ever read on the subject. We come to understand that these well-intentioned but ultimately sadistic treatments, rather than cure one, instead simply cow one into submission.

The central metaphor of this book is that his life, in a very odd way, is tied to the football New York Giants of the late fifties and early sixties, and especially to Frank Gifford, a Giant, and Exley's contemporary. While everything else in his life is going out of control, his handle on reality is this team, and their star flanker. Indeed, he attended USC when Gifford was there, and moved back to New York at the same time Gifford became a Giant. He admires them; their quality is the one thing he can understand with lucidity. And it is Gifford's season-ending injury, suffered at the hands of Chuck Bednarik in 1960 (an event which every person claiming to be a football fan ought to know about), which shocks him into an understanding of his own mortality. He finally realizes that there is only a finite amount of time to waste being a drunk.

As I mentioned, the book is often wildly humorous, but at the same time it can be very powerful. It is difficult to quote from because the style simply does not lend itself to one-liners or sound-bites, but I will give it a try. Bumpy, his brother-in-law, initially comes across as a clown, a drunk, and an obnoxious buffoon. We laugh and laugh at Exley's description of his barroom forays and his filthy apartment. And then: "Beneath his wooden jollity, Bumpy was consuming himself with hate; and for one so seemingly self-conscious, so oppressivley inward, so apparently aware of nothing outside his own filthy tongue, Bumpy had an acute, nearly pathological insight into the temperature of those about him." Pow! Our little Bumpy is quite a bit more complex than we imagined.

Exley is unsparingly honest, describing his often disgraceful behaviour in the most lurid terms, and between that which he does and that which is done to him this book--despite its glaring intelligence--could have easily sunk into wallowing self-pity. But it never does, and that, I think, is why it emerges triumphant. It is a book written with wry bemusement and self-deprecating humor, and by one who, despite everything, has made the astonishing discovery that he likes himself. This book is a real original. A superior achievement.

In these ridiculous 'dot.com' times, when the making of money has somehow assumed a hip cachet among the young, this fantastic novel is more important than ever. Exley's struggle to simply live, get by, in a family, society and world in which he feels like such a stranger, in which his values alienate him from peers and colleagues, is fascinating, funny and painful. The narrative is simply gripping, and there is never the sentimental solace of 'lessons learned' or personal transformation. This is one man's view of himself and the world, a view never seen on TV, in the movies, or heard on the radio. And his voice is needed more than ever. Hopefully, this book will be kept in print perpetually.

A Fan's Notes is one of the best books I have ever read. This guy is amazing. Keep a dictionary handy--it's well worth it. Some say this book is more sad than funny. I disagree wholeheartedly. A conventional life is what's sad. Mr. Exley-- drunken sot or not, is beyond eloquent. The writing is beautiful and the story is thought provoking. When I read the last sentence I felt a tangle of strong emotions that I still have not, nor do I care to, unravel. Thank God for people like Frederick Exley. Get rid of what you think you know about living a successful life and just enjoy.

Exley died of alcoholism in 1992 at the age of 63. Most of his life had been spent living with friends and family members. The only job he apparently ever held was as a high school English teacher for a couple of years. He was an utter failure, an utter misfit in mainstream American life. In fact a recent biography of him by Jonathan Yardley is entitled "Misfit." He wrote this novel as well as fictional memoirs, "Pages from a Cold Island" and "Last Notes from Home." He won several prizes for non-fictional short pieces and journalistic bits, too.

This novel is regarded as a cult classic and consists of a picaresque account of Exley's drunken wanderings in and out of a mental institution along with great portrayals of the strange characters he had encountered in his life. He is tortured by the memory of his father, a football hero who died when Exley was a teenager. Unlike his father, Exley is an abysmal failure at everything in life. He is a football fan, fixated on the New York Giants and most particularly, Frank Gifford. In fact therein lies the heart of his big epiphany at the end of the novel. Just as importantly, he has wonderful insights into the torture of becoming a writer and what he went through to get there. The book is just brutally, unbelievably honest.

It is most certainly a book for only a small number of readers--those who have something of the misfit in themselves. If you have a bit of that in you, it is an hilarious and rollicking read.

Fredrick Exley's A Fan's Notes is the ordinary jo's book; it is a man's blunt search for the meaning of life. For him, it is not marriage, children, the perfect house and such. It is fame and glory on an unthinkable level. When that level is unattainable, the reality of ordinariness sets in, an ordinariness that is only assuaged by alcohol, shock treatment, sex, dreaming, verbal vulgarity and sports -- the latter Exley knows very much about. The trials and tribulations that make up Exley's life, and his struggle to comprehend them, makes A Fan's Notes wonderful, compelling and enjoyable reading!

With A Fan's Notes, we enter into the tormented, alcoholic life of Frederick Exley, what he calls a "fictional memoir," and one can only hope,for his own sake, that the story is more a work of fiction than a memoir.The tale begins at the New Parrot Resturaunt in Watertown, New York, just minutes before a New York Giants game where, after a weekend of hard drinking, Freddy has what he thinks is a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital.After that, A Fan's Notes flashes back and forth in time, taking the reader from Watertown, where Exley grew up,to USC, where he has his first brush with fame (by way of meeting a still-in-school Frank Gifford),to Chicago and Florida for various drunken misadventares, back to New York and the sanotarium Avalon Valley (where by now Gifford is a Giant), and finally back home to his mother's davenport.In the telling of his story, Exley writes of cracked alcoholic insanity,desperate financial anxiety, and the shiftless paralization of a hopeless dreamer.But it's not all "finances and romances" or "bad livers and broken hearts."Frederick Exley, in his own words, could never really accept "that even in America failure is a part of life." He was concerned with the longing for fame, and the realization that he would probably spend his life as an unknown, unimportant man. A Fan's Notes is one of the saddest books I have ever read, and it is also one of the best.

As I went through A Fan's Notes I couldn't stop thinking of it as a sequel to J.D. Salinger's famous coming of age novel The Catcher in the Rye. From the utter lack of direction to his search for the ideal and deeper meaning to life, Fred Exley is every bit the Holden Caulfield. Exley details his life of alcoholism, his dreams of making it big on Madison Avenue and marrying the perfect girl with the golden thighs, his numerous trips to his mother's davenport, the mental asylum and back again, his mindless endeavors with the mysterious Mr. Blue, the Counselor and anyone else he can hit up for money, and of course his infatuation with the inimitable Frank Gifford.

Though it may read like one man's rant about a wasted life and lost opportunities, A Fan's Notes is a reflection of people's universal albeit often doomed quest to escape anonymity, and ultimately matter in this world. Exley's insatiable desire for fame and not so subtle rebellion against society are his ways of attempting to be "more than a mere fan in this life." Oppressed by the shadows of his father and his fellow USC grad Frank Gifford, Exley is consumed by his need to escape. However, he is also haunted by the harrowing superficiality and phoniness of the reality. Unable to reconcile his pursuit of purpose and his ideal vision of the world, Exley sinks into depression and finds himself sustained only by alcohol and football.

By his own admission, Exley is stuck in the past or rather past-present, utterly incapacitated by the continuous wave of change. This book should serve as a warning to people's indulgence in self-pity and constant comparison with false heroes. Indeed it was only after Frank Gifford's debilitating injury that Exley was able to come to terms with his life and accomplish the one act that now defines his life- writing A Fan's Notes.

Since I've read this book I've tried several times to sort out just what it is that makes it so compelling. Is it the writing? Is it the story? Or is it the sad fact that this really isn't fiction at all? I believe that the book Exley wrote and the book we are reading are two completely different animals; and that this is what makes "A Fan's Notes" impossible to put down. When we read the book, we're not concerned so much with Frank Gifford as with the man behind the typewriter who truly idolized the Giant halfback. We see the tragedy in Exley's attempts to pawn off his life as humorous fiction; we see through his double-speak and rationalizations. If Exley weren't so tragic in life, this novel would be little more than cute. As such, its genius lies beyond the realm of fiction (indeed, as fiction, it's hardly genius at all) and into the realm of psychology. It's a truly original work but one which may very well have left people laughing at Exley instead of with him. And this is what makes it so remarkable.

Long before the self-help and men's movements, writers like Frederick Exley told honest and epic tales of sound and fury that came from their own experiences. Exley's 1968 groundbreaking novel "A Fan's Notes" is one such work, a novel of biographical fiction whose power has only grown with time and whose addition to the Modern Library is entirely fitting. The story frames the author's young life, from his adolescence in upstate New York to his post-collegiate wanderings in New York City. The tale is not a happy one, full as it is of depression, alcoholism, and perhaps the worst of Exley's maladies, hero-worship -- for his father, a smalltown football legend, his war-hero brother, and his Southern Cal classmate and New York Giant Frank Gifford. Like Salieri in "Amadeus," Exley's narrative voice in "A Fan's Notes" is distinctly aware of its failures beside the greatness around it, and that painful awareness makes the story a masochist's paradise that the reader spirals through. The journey takes us through Exley's uninspired youth of inebriated musing, aimless existence, and half-hearted attempts at careerism, showing us all the while his ill-timed punches at life's shadows.In the end, we and he somehow emerge alive but armored for future struggles with bitter wisdom, in no small measure due to the power of power of Exley's extensive prose. Perhaps because we no longer think it fashionable to judge such men kindly or with a respect for their complex foibles,"A Fan's Notes," after nearly 30 years in print, serves in our time as a harsh but needed reminder of the ongoing struggle of the artist to be true to himself and his work, even when he has no apparent love for either.

This is my favorite work of fiction. Other things written by Exley are not very impressive - this is a great work and it is simultaneously full of humor and sadness.