His trilogy (A Fan's Notes'' was subtitled ''A Fictional Memoir'') looms behind the current memoir vogue,Īlthough Exley's own confessions of impotence and failure flaunted no redemptive or therapeutic aspirations but tilted more toward the fantastic self-displays of the lunatic esthetics of his beloved Vladimir Nabokov. Yet Frederick Exley was also one of the most cunning stylists, at once hardboiled and mandarin, in recent fiction. (admittedly with shame) a night when he shouted, ''Hey, nigger lover!'' at an interracial couple or quip (apparently without shame) that he wanted to bash with a spiked club the ''cinema starlets''įeatured in the Sunday entertainment pages. One to stare at a madman.'' Fantasizing about fame, oozing self-pity, Exley steadily skirted a kind of tough-guy sentimentality and worse: misogyny, bigotry against homosexuals and, occasionally, racism. Most of those who remained had seen the show before and had come back for more, bringing with them the morbid fascination which compels ''Certainly I drove a good many customers away. ''Aįan's Notes,'' for instance, documented Exley's obsession with the New York Giants, particularly with Frank Gifford, and Exley exposed himself as the loudest, creepiest jerk in the bar. A terrifying late photograph of the novelist strikes a cartoon of atavistic American literary masculinity: the Hemingwayesque beard and proudly vaulted belly, the freshly lighted cigarette, the ready vodkaīottle and, along the bookshelf, a neat lineup of last-ditch pharmaceuticals.Įxley's autobiographical trilogy, ''A Fan's Notes'' (1968), ''Pages From a Cold Island'' (1975) and ''Last Notes From Home'' (1988), may strike many as similarly pickled. Nly five years after his death at the age of 63, Frederick Exley might seem as impossible to defend (or comprehend) as any resurgent anachronism - lounge music,

More on Frederick Exley from The New York Times Archives.Jonathan Yardley's life of Frederick Exley, writer, dreamer and perpetual underdog

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley