A FAN'S NOTES - Softcover

Exley, Frederick

4.06

4,436 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394729153 ISBN 13: 9780394729152

Publisher: Vintage, 1985

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Frederick Exley's inimitable "fictional memoir" A Fan's Notes has assumed the status of a classic since its first publication in 1968. Mordantly and poignantly, Exley describes the profound failures of his life - professional, sexual, and personal. His attempts to find a place for himself in an unaccommodating world take him from the University of Southern California to Chicago - where he meets the dangerously seductive, lovely Bunny Sue Allorgee - to New York City's Greenwich Village saloons, and back to Watertown, his hometown in upstate New York, where he spends months on his mother's living room davenport watching television before undergoing shock treatment at Avalon Valley hospital. Between bars, women, and jobs, Exley exercises his obsession with the New York Giants and their great halfback Frank Gifford, until he at last realizes his life's ambition: writing A Fan's Notes.

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Review:

Frederick Exley recounts his life as the son of a hero-worshipped high school athlete who is doomed to be a spectator not only of sports, but of life. From irresponsible drifter, to dreamer of impossible dreams, to drunkard, to frequent patient at an asylum, Exley carried baggage from his childhood through much of his adult life, never feeling he could escape the dark cloud of expectation that hung over him. When Frank Gifford, former New York Giants backfield star, is injured, Exley is jolted into painful realisations about his life and a confession.

Review:

"A Fan's Notes is one man's life written with brilliance and insight. No one should have had Exley's life, and no one who has read it can forget it" (James Dickey)

"Writers of every kind of aesthetic and cultural persuasion talk about it and press it on their friends. When I urge it on a friend who asks what it is about or what it is like, I say read it, just read it" (Geoffrey Wolff)

"Astonishing... It is visceral and intimate. Self-absorbed, it is also searingly perceptive about what happens between fathers and sons, men and women" (Independent)

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