Jonathan Yardley's introduction explains that Frederick Exley had intended to publish A Fan's Notes as a memoir, but was asked to novelize it by Harper & Row, who feared libel actions. We have this amazing book, Yardley writes, a caustic masterpiece by a man who was essentially an alcoholic bum - he never held one job for more than a few months, he spent months or years crashing on other people's "davenports," including his parents' and various alumni of the mental hospital he had received treatment from: so where did this masterpiece come from? Exley was just a guy who had gotten interested in literature as an undergraduate at USC. Also, "no one knows for certain when and where he wrote it." This is a mystery with no witnesses!The novel is a ruthlessly honest portrayal of an addict's narcissism and self-loathing (two traits which are inseparable). We never find out what Exley's mental illness was (apparently the hospital didn't either), but even as a confessional of someone who just can't seem to get up off the sofa it's painful enough reading, without having a precise diagnosis. Exley pinpoints the source of his malaise after a street fight he picks with two gay men, one white, one black: "I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny - unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd - to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan."There's a relentless mid-century misogyny, an inability to see women (except one's mother) as anything other than Barbies with golden flanks, honeyed hair, and butterscotch epidermises. If women are not Barbies, they're intelligent but castrating Betty Friedans, or Amazonian harridans given battleship nicknames. Or, like Exley's fictional wife Patience, they're Bryn Mawr graduates who nonetheless need Exley's assistance writing up their reports for the divorce court judges they work for. The only sentient being Exley seems to know how to love with his whole heart is his mother's dog Christie III.The best passages from A Fan's Notes are on a writerly par with the best of Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. My two favorite passages come from the chapter where Exley has moved to Chicago for one of the few jobs he will hold, this one in the public relations department of a railroad. In this first passage he perfectly captures the essence of a place; so perfectly, in fact, that the same passage could describe this neighborhood today if you replace "airline hostess" with "Groupon sales rep":There I lived in that section called the Near North Side, a paradise for the young men and women - airlines hostesses with airlines hostesses, rising executives with rising executives, Junior Leaguers with Junior Leaguers, voyeurs with voyeurs - who overflowed its modern town houses and converted Victorian mansions, men and women who reigned, or were, in youth's obliviousness, sure they reigned supreme there. The section had an absurd though touching notion of itself as the Greenwich Village of the Plains; but the young men I knew there seemed blatantly and refreshingly unburdened with things of the mind, and the fine, corn-bred, yellow-haired girls as succulently wholesome as cream of chicken soup. Never once in the two years I lived there was I distressed by the possibility - as perhaps I was in New York - that there were men and women in the area seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their joy, their grief, their passion. Never once did I detect in a saloon, as I had begun to detect in the Village, the dark, brooding silhouette of a man apart, a man caught up and held in awe by the singularity of his vision.In Chicago Exley meets and becomes obsessed with a young (yellow-haired) woman named Bunny Sue Allorgee, who takes him home to spend a weekend with her parents, who live in a scary dystopia:The Allorgees lived in a suburb of a suburb, their particular little suburb being Heritage Heights. [As far as I'm aware, this is a made-up name.] It was a suburb that had apparently never caught on. The streets were all there, but there was only one house, Allorgees' Acres, a great, white, one-storied, rambling ranch-type place in which everything from garage to game room to hot-water heater was found on the single story that shot out in all sorts of clapboard arms, like the spokes of a painted wagon wheel. "The Heights" was not on any height at all; this was the American Midwest at its most grotesque, treeless and cold-looking as far as the eye could see, so that it only seemed set on high ground. There was only one thing that broke the endless blue monotony of the heavens - a television aerial that rose so high that it dizzied one to look up at it, an aerial which, I was proudly informed, put the Allorgees on certain clear days in contact with all parts of the Republic. It was a touching monument to their isolation. In answer to my question about its astounding height, Chuck (or Poppy) - as the father was interchangeably designated - said only that he liked "good reception."
Reasons I should have liked this book:» It’s meant to be open, soul-searching and literary while at the same time appealing to my gender – the coarse one, that is.» It’s a somewhat fictionalized memoir by a die-hard NY Giants fan. Though they’re not my team, it was written at the time I was first gaining sports consciousness, learning that a skinny kid could somehow connect to the world of uncles if he knew how many yards Jim Brown gained against the Rams. » It supposedly set the stage for Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, a book I really liked detailing lifestyles of the thirsty and laddish, supporting Arsenal football. » It won the 1968 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel and was a National Book Award finalist.Reasons I didn’t:» Its subtitle is A Fictional Memoir, but according to Wikipedia it follows the real events of Exley’s troubled, booze-sodden life pretty much to a tee. Whether the narrator was 9% Exley or 99%, it didn’t matter to me; I just didn’t like him. He was a bully and a butthead, his opinion of himself suffered Weimar Republic levels of inflation, and the list of his excuses for bad behavior was as lame as it was long. » Exley was a man’s man, which is OK in and of itself, but he was just so blatant in his hatred of women. He took great pleasure in hitting one for giving a dead-drunk friend of his a hard time. A good rule of thumb says that any guy you imagine using the “Quit bustin’ my balls” line is not confronting a problem, he is the problem. » There wasn’t nearly as much about what makes a sports fan tick as I was expecting. Hornby’s book was far better at that. All would have been forgiven, of course, had the more general self-characterization won me over. While Exley did do a decent job of identifying some of his many flaws, he was often less than sincere owning up to them – an egoist through and through. » It disappoints me that this book has a cult following. Somebody even opened a bar named after him. To me, that would be like the Lance Armstrong Sports Nutrition Shoppe. » Exley’s writing talent has been praised, often by Exley himself, but I found a fair amount of it clunky and overcooked. The adverbs were the worst offenders. (E.g., anguishingly solemn, an unbridledly dear price, admonitorily advising) To veraciously tell you the truth, it made me surpassingly peevish and dampeningly unsatisfied. A token attempt to be fair:» Some of the writing wasn’t bad. The best parts tended to confess things. This line describing his short-term, ill-fated teaching experience was one of his best: “Sadly, I lacked the intelligence to simplify, and with an utterly monolithic and formidable pedantry I thought nothing of demanding that my students feed me back my own quackery.”» Exley’s father was a locally famous athlete with a competitive streak that made me think that the defeated son came by his hang-ups honestly. » Alcoholism is a disease. Maybe the poor excuses, offensive behavior, and irresponsibility are just common symptoms, and a book that shows this clearly is just being true to type.» It’s not necessary to like the narrator to like the book. For me, though, it often helps. While I can easily appreciate a memoir showing how to be, I also want to be open to one showing truthfully (and wartfully, if you can forgive my newly attained habit for bad adverbs) how certain people simply are. But who ever said Goodreads ratings had to be fair? 2.5 stars rounded down ill-naturedly to 2
What do You think about A Fan's Notes (1988)?
What's going on with me lately?Usually I'm all: "Kafka this, kafka that, dalkey book, Stacey Levine, something french, kafka kafka kafka" ad nauseam. But so far this year it's been mostly cultural criticism and history, even a twinkle-dinkle of poetry (and I don't even know how to READ poetry). I could say I'm having a jolly cross-disciplinary time, but let's be honest: I'm having a literary meltdown.Part of that meltdown is reflected in the only two works of fiction I've been able to finish lately, which have been Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? and Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes. These aren't books in translation nor books I'd at first consider experimental. They're near-memoirs. Real as realism gets. They're the kind of book I normally pass over for something more eccentric.I don't know about you but when I think realism I think safe. And who want's that? I want an author who's going to drive me over the goddam cliff.Well I have been driven over the goddam cliff, just not the cliff I'm used to, and perhaps that's the thrill. I don't really want to unpack Exley's book. I just want to say, from a guy like me, who has never watched a football game all the way through or cared to, who hasn't born the cross of alcoholism or done time on the funny farm, who has never been in an honest-to-god fist fight, who's never had much of anything to recommend his manliness, whose life is not necessarily in shambles, that this life, the life of Fred Exley, is one all peoples should read and recognize as their own.That is to say, I get it. I get why Fred Exley puts himself back together long enough to get in front of a TV on Sunday and to bawl his head off for his favorite player on the New York Giants: "Oh God, he did it! Gifford did it! He caught the goddam thing!" It may sound like he's blaspheming, but he's not; he's having a god moment, a moment larger than himself, a moment which offers the possibility of salvation. It's more pertinent now than ever, the revelation Exley had, about the joys and sorrows of living in a world of vicarious spectacle, the joys and sorrows of being a fan. As an unpublished writer snooping around goodreads, I have my god moments, too.The other thing I want to take away from this book is a caution to myself personally. The book is helped by an elevated, nigh Nabokovian style, which coming from a narrator with stains all over his sweats reads as crooning irony. I couldn't get enough of it. However, the highest irony of all is that this tweedy side, which Exley assumes through most of the book is going to save him, is actually the main problem. It's the illusion that pins him down and that will always pin him down, because he loves it. I have a tweedy side myself, a nice and musty smirking booky tweedy side. I'm thankful to Exley for helping me pick a fight with it.Onward with the literary meltdown!
—Nathanimal
It's tough for me to find a decent place to begin. This book -- and you must know that I'm not usually prone to superlative reviews of anything -- has been hugely important to me over these last two months. And it took two full months to read simply because it is such a painfully beautiful book, passages read over and over again and all that pretentious book-nerd shit. I re-read both Brothers K and Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge this year -- mostly because they are two beloved and character-forming books for me -- but this one, I hasten to say, right now, outstrips them both in its importance. The book follows a literary drunk as he navigates post-college and his obsession with football and women and drinking and deep alien depression. I'm probably falling for the same that people who read Kerouac suffer -- and Exley is of the same imitable Beat cloth -- but I'll accept the punch-drunkeness of this book and give it a high endorsement nonetheless. Here is a taste:"It occurs to me now that my enthusiasms might better have been placed with God or Literature or Humanity; but in the penumbra of such upper-case pieties I have always experienced an excessive timidity rendering me tongue-tied or forcing me to emit the brutal cynicisms with which the illiterate confront things they do not understand.""I returned east to New York, an A.B. in English in my portfolio, a longing in the heart the clue to my countenance. What did I long for? At twenty-three, I of course longed for fame. Not only did I long for it, I suffered myself the singular notion that fame was an heirloom passed on from my father.""Unlike some men I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by entended sobriety.""After that unremitting spring of beer, pasta, Tia Maria, and futility, I found my body thirty pounds overweight, my cerebrum as dopey as a eunuch's dong."
—David
Put me amongst the legions of the Fred Exley cult. While this may have been his only great work, A Fan’s Notes is great, albeit horribly pitiful. The book as many paradoxes: funny but sad, intelligent but silly, frustrating but satisfying and compassionate but mean. Also, the book is very carefully constructed although Exley tries hard to give the appearance of being cavalier-like a teen boy who spends hours mussing up his hair. The book is reportedly autobiographical but Exley plays with the me
—Lostinanovel
