E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968
by Ernie on 24/02/10 at 9:12 am
E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968.
This fictional memoir is as breathless and manic as its author surely was when couch-surfing his way across Eisenhower’s America, steadfastly refusing to grow up, always lurking in the shadow of his beloved local sports-hero father, who died at 40. Fred, Ex, Exley, Freddy, he’s a man torn in a thousand directions and led down many a rabbit hole by all sorts of ne’er-do-wells, denizens of smoky bars, rabid sports fans, shysters and hucksters, disbarred lawyers, alcoholics, womanizers, the devils, demons, and fallen angels of an America otherwise filled with promise (this is the 1950s) for charmed young men like himself.
Young Exley dreams of himself as a famous writer before ever putting a word down (we’ve all seen this before), and this inspires him to act out his fantasy to bewildered potential employers, briefly starry-eyed young ladies, and all manner of men who never grew up, who see him as he wants to be seen, which leads only to further self-destruction. After each frantic foray out into the American wilderness he winds up prostrate on his mother’s (or someone else’s) “davenport” for months, reading books, talking to the dog, watching endless hours of television, until that fateful day, which he always expects, when the men in white coats stride up the lawn to collect him and put him away once more.
When he finally manages to get married and put his wild experiences down on paper, he burns the hundreds of collected pages in a fit of pique, leading his long-suffering wife to wonder just what she is going to do with him. Only after he’s burned himself out as well, brightly and painfully through his youth, is he able to commit his life to the form we finally have, A Fan’s Notes. This is A Million Little Pieces written by a master of the language (and a more honest man). Exley explains from the outset: “Though the events in this book bear similarity to those of that long malaise, my life . . . I have drawn freely from the imagination and adhered only loosely to the pattern of my past life. To this extent, and for this reason, I ask to be judged a writer of fantasy.”
The language builds and builds in elegance until it becomes almost unseemly and garish, but it never quite topples over into babble. You find yourself again and again entranced and seduced by the young rogue remembered by the self-critical middle-aged author. You will detest the narrator of this book at times, but he will make you laugh. You will not worry for his safety, but you will wonder what in the hell he’s going to do next. The larger story is that of a generation that came into adulthood after the Greatest Generation but before the Boomers. The narrator feels he could never live up to the manhood of his father, but he also feels threatened by the younger generation so full of confidence and health that rises up after him. The book is more a series of picaresque adventures than anything resembling a properly-organized novel, but it’s a fun book, and it’s a cool book, and so we find it on our list.
