Customer Reviews

Last Notes from Home

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It is true. This is a very disordered work, and at times seems to be doing its best to instill the reader with the same kind of wild confusion the writer often confesses himself suffering from. True the last part of the book seems to me anyway far less satisfactory than the first. True also that there is something sort of contemptible and dismissive in the author's attitude to most of the people he meets.
But against all this is one more powerful truth. Exley could really write. His language is alive, and his characters are real characters, crazy originals who he gives a strong feeling of the presence of. He too within this all has a kind of moral outrage a stance which I think comes out most strongly in what for me is the best part of the book his writing about his brother. The tone of outrage and anger with which he tells the story is fierce and deep in feeling.
His brother 'The Brigadier', ( This is a nickname as the brother has worked himself up from the ranks to 'Chicken Colonel' only) a veteran of three wars, the Second World War, Korea, the Vietnam War is diagnosed with cancer at the age of forty-three. The opening chapters of the book describe the author -narrator 's plane-trip with his mother to say farewell to the brother, and as it turns out attend his funeral. In the course of this Exley meets on the plane a stewardess who will become his off and on-mistress in the years ahead, and is another of his spectacularly crazy and original characters. She will turn out to be such an inveterate liar that nothing she says or for that matter which is said about her, can be relied on. This by the way applies to the whole story as Exley himself it is clear is a tremendous fantasizer, whose gift is not only fictionalizing reality but in letting his fantasies become his reality. The bottle apparently helps him in this.
But the story of the brother is a moving one. Exley's description of the unit his brother is apart of coming to the Yalu river and looking out at vast wastes of Manchuria in the Korean War is a gripping one. His claim in the course of this that MacArthur actually knew the Chinese would make a counter- offensive that would decimate a large share of this unit is so far as I know not substantiated by evidence. But part of Exley's outrage is his sense that his brother and the grunts like him were betrayed by the military higher- ups .
In fact one other fascinating side of Exley here and in his work is in general is in his involvement in and description of a very male world, the worlds of fighting and violence. This is brought out in other sections of the work when he is involved in bar- hopping with a character who proves to be incredibly violent. There is one description of a bar- fight in which this character goes overboard beating up and incapacitating two drunken construction workers.
Clearly part of the charm of Exley was his toughness, a certain macho quality in his language. His work is in the tradition of Fielding's Tom Jones and is like Donleavy's 'The Ginger Man' and Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" in being a kind of alcholic's picaresque. Only in Exley's case the elements of failure and disorder are so great as to make it clear that this is no celebration of self , but rather a kind of rough fight in which he most of all beats up on himself.
But again at its best the work can be both moving and hilarious. There is tastelessness in it and a degree of vulgarity beyond that which I am accustomed to or really like. But there is also some kind of redemption here , or rather the reader's wish that somehow it would turn out all differently and that Exley 's life and this book would turn out better than it does.
In any case. This is a real writer and one whoever cares about him can be proud of.

A Fan's Notes was so good, I should have known that the subsequent contributions would not hold up. I was correct. I found myself having a difficult time finishing this book. It was obvious Fred was struggling to recapture the magic of a Fan's Notes, couldn't do it, and acknowledged same in Notes from a Cold Island. The spontaneous hilarity of AFN was warmed over and forced in NFACI. NFACI (and the subsequent Final Notes from Home) only serve to demonstrate that he had considerable talent but it was wasted away in his losing battle with the bottle.

Although personally I liked it well enough. I think what helped was going in with such low expectations.

Here's Mary Cantwell, of the NYT: "Last Notes From Home" (1988) is a sad book, less because of its subject matter -- its center is his brother's death -- than because of the franticness with which its author tried to impose order on a stubbornly inchoate narrative."

Exley is rightly regarded as having written one of the best debut novels ever: A Fan's Notes, but the two books he published after that, Pages From A Cold Island, and this one, are widely considered self-indulgent junk. Not hard to see what critics such as Jonathan Yardley mean by that: "Last Notes from Home" contains about 50 pages on the all the niggling annoyances of a plane flight, for example.

Well, I knew all that but was determined to read it anyway. I like Exley's voice, see. It's sinewy, masculine, hilarious and searing by turns. Exley is always fully in command of the language, and I guess that in this book he's just one of those people like Adam Carolla: he's not saying much, but nevertheless it's enjoyable to hear him complain and deprecate himself. It's also refreshing to hear a voice from the time before PC.

Here's Alan Bisbort: " [...] I recently read 'Last Notes from Home,' the final volume in the autobiographical trilogy by Frederick Exley, a writer I once greatly admired. As I read it, I was aghast at how bad it was. Not the writing--no, Exley was one of the most talented writers of his generation--but the spirit that infused it: broken down, self-pitying, repetitious, and not funny in the least. How could I have so admired such a person? There was something so pathetic in his feigned jollity, not to mention contrived plot, that almost brought me to tears--for all the wrong reasons."

The problem with Frederick Exley is that he should have never left Watertown. A Fan's Notes is justly praised, and one of its strengths is its autobiographical nature, plus the fact that it is anchored squarely, if not always geographically, in the Watertown of his youth and how it shaped him. When Exley writes about Watertown in this final novel, it is as good--indeed, likely better--as anything he has written, but when he goes too far afield from there, his work unravels. It is, as a whole, very uneven, but it is worthwhile, even if only for the Watertown bits.

One of Mr. Exley's greatest: a whole pantheon of eclectic and original characters woven into Fred's life, from the redoubtable Lord Lisdoonvarna, Tobey and the Ass and Robin who likes to give ()... a book not to be missed. Read it with fresh eyes and think of Fred.

This book is wonderful and should be read by all who love "A Fan's Notes." The unforgettable final image stays with me (don't want to put any spoilers in here, but check the cover illustration).