Word: exley
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...FREDERICK EXLEY 274 pages. Random House...
...ever a successful novel seemed to be its own happy ending, it was Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968). In a captivating blend of fiction and autobiography, with remarkable humor and pitiless self-scrutiny, Exley, a high school football player turned writer and pressagent, told how his youthful fantasies of athletic and literary glory ripened into alcoholism, two ruined marriages, three stints in state mental institutions. For winters on end, he remembered, all that kept him lurching from Sunday to Sunday was an obsession with pro football and the exploits of New York Giant Halfback Frank...
Pixilated Idyl. Those who thought that success would spoil Exley's romance with failure underestimated his capacity for masochism. In Pages from a Cold Island, he comes up with a new hero to feel dwarfed beside. No mere football star, either. This time he has chosen the century's pre-eminent American critic and man of letters, Edmund Wilson. Once he creeps into Wilson's shadow, Exley happily sets off on another binge of literary self-deprecation...
Along the way, he swiftly tries to demolish or denigrate the success of A Fan's Notes, which got splendid reviews, sold respectably, and won some literary awards. For a while, Exley garnered fan notes of his own, as well as lecture invitations and a chance to hobnob with the likes of Norman Mailer and Saul...
...Breslin, King and a few reporters walked quickly towards Boylston Street, fleeing the Coop forever, Breslin turned and said, "I was reading that Exley book [ A Fan's Notes]. I don't know what I'm doing on the same side of the street as that guy." He led the group like a platoon leader, stopping once (at Nini's, for a paper) before reaching the ultimate destination-Whitney's on Boylston Street. Once there, Breslin went right to the bar and made a place for himself. A late-afternoon talk show blared from the TV set high above...