Word: exley
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...NOTES, by Frederick Exley. A young man, unable to participate in the American myth, uses pro-football heroes to act out his own ineluctable dreams...
...NOTES, by Frederick Exley. In this rambling, scrambling, fictionalized memoir, a young man, unable to participate in the American myth, uses pro-football heroes to act out his own in eluctable dreams...
Misspent Manhood. Alas, when the real Freddy Exley stands up, he proves to be singularly inept. Drunkenly, he stumbles from one football weekend to the next. The games with their supermen provide the pitiful framework for his misspent manhood. He destroys his fledgling career in publicity. He finds that his dream girl personified the materialistic, castrating American woman. His weaknesses lead him to three stays in sanatoriums. Finally, he becomes a contemporary Oblomov, spending his nights and days on couches and beds, living in the marathon shadow world of television's cultural prefabrication, and talking...
...What Exley (the character) cannot come to terms with is his inability to own the streets paved with gold, his failure to capture the imagination of the crowd, his realization that he was never even meant to be a contender for the crown. He is, in effect, an ordinary man forced to stand on the sidelines and cheer bitterly. "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...
...them a salesman named Mr. Blue, who will perform 50 push-ups at the drop of a hint. The narrative ramblings, like a drunk's broken-field running, occasionally lose the reader in a muddiness of form. But they are part of the mad scramble that eventually makes Exley the winner his protagonist was so desperate...