A Fan's Notes (1968)

Frederick Exley asks us to judge his first novel as fiction because it's clearly closer to autofiction, if not outright memoir. Parts of it, to make his case, are thus painfully obviously made up, like the marriage of the first-person main character ("Fred") and the unlikely sons that come of it. The rest is ripped straight out of Exley's strange alcoholic storytelling way of life. I read this in the '70s and love-loved it, mostly for its rambling rolling voice, which shuffles the deck of time in episodes that range across the 1950s. He teaches. He writes. He works PR. He drinks a lot. He moves around a lot. He has periods living on the couches of friends, periods at home with his mother. He even goes in and out of mental institutions—hmm, seems like I read a lot of novels in the '70s by people who spent time in mental hospitals. Fred also has a king-size obsession with New York Giants football star Frank Gifford, which is where A Fan's Notes really feels old-school now but it's also basically the heart of the book. Gifford was Fred's age, and this obsession started when they went to USC at the same time. Fred reports relationships but most of them don't feel real. He betrays his literary ambitions by meditations on Edmund Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway, and other usual suspects. More than anything he is a raconteur—a silver-tongued devil who loves to spin yarn, use big words, and write long lively sentences. He's fun but he's a hot mess hit and miss. I certainly don't know if I'd want to be friends with him. It's fair to call him pre-feminist here, but I note that predictably he was hostile to feminism in the sequel to A Fan's Notes and second "novel" in a trilogy, Pages From a Cold Island, published in 1975 and featuring an encounter with Gloria Steinem. I liked the Gifford worship in A Fan's Notes, or whatever it was, because it really is a kind of practical demonstration of pure fan behavior. The drinking and the institutionalizations—three separate trips in and out of the same facility—struck me as more alarming than entertaining, but that's how I usually am with drunks and their stories. A recent reread went slower than I expected. It might be one of those things that's only amazing once. I couldn't help noticing all the backwards and cockeyed ideas this time, mostly about women but occasionally on race. He's riding the crests of white man supremacy without even knowing it, of course, which practically goes without saying, all things considered. He's terrible on women, needy and conflicted with no sense of self-awareness. But A Fan's Notes is entertaining on its own terms and a kind of time capsule too. I still love his voice, a barbaric yawping thing, carefully crafted.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.