Word: exley
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...NATURE, Fred Exley is a fan. His first book. A Fan's Notes, is a portrait of his life as an outsider and a wanderer whose only solace comes from cheering on his personal hero. The Fiff (Frank Gifford of the N.Y. Giants), every Sunday afternoon. His fate is to "sit in the stands with most men and exalt the exploits of others...
From one standpoint. A Fan's Notes is a chronicle of personal failure--Exley is a middle-aged alcoholic who tries to make ends meet by teaching writing and literature to college kids. He has been in and out of an insane asylum, gone through two marriages, and now he spends most days hovering over a drink. His life, by his own admission, is a waste. With one exception: Exley can write about his problems, failures and feeling of inadequacy with honesty...
Very few have Exley's capacity to write a personal narrative without turning it into a sudsy melodrama or confessional. His self-deprecating humor and disciplined writing style help him retain perspective, and maybe it's easier for him precisely because he's always been an outsider...
...Exley's major problem is his inability to latch on--to his wife or jobs or American life. Somehow he was never bequeathed the necessary ambition or stamina. Because he has no roots, he travels, and Notes is full of encounters with odd characters that evoke a bittersweet mixture of sympathy and contempt. The strangest of the lot is Mr. Blue, an aging door-to-door salesman still capable of doing 50 push-ups on request, who lives with a six-foot woman gymnastics teacher. But Exley also makes more "ordinary" encounters memorable. And the web of brawls begun over...
Critic's Tribute. Edmund Wilson's death in June 1972 really gave Exley something to grieve about. He was seized by the desire "to take something of Wilson to carry with me" because Wilson had been everything he was not: dignified, dedicated, the last survivor of the lost, drunken literary generation. What was more, there was a tenuous connection between the two men. Wilson's final years had been spent restoring his ancestral stone house in Talcottville, not far from Exley's native Watertown, N.Y. Exley had never met Wilson, but then he had barely...