A Fan’s Notes – Review

A Fan’s Notes

by Frederick Exley (Vintage)
by Sleeping Dogg

Are you a drunk? Have you wanted to identify your addiction in hip literary circles but been unwilling to go quite as far as, say, disciples of William Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson? Read this book. Vintage has made a welcome reissue of this ’60s classic, the winner of several awards and much critical acclaim in its day but never a true cult book after the fashion of Naked Lunch, On the Road, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Exley was too young to be a Beat writer and didn’t pay proper homage to the gods of the day; although A Fan’s Notes was published in 1968, it might just as well have been a cookbook for all the mention it makes of what is called by today’s media culture clique “social turmoil.” It fails to mention even once, for instance, the assassination of John Kennedy and takes note of the war in Vietnam only in its final pages. For these shortcomings and others like them the book has been mostly ignored by our nostalgic press over the years. Neither a novel nor an autobiography, the book is subtitled instead a “fictional memoir,” a plotless melange that traces the author’s life, roughly, from his adolescence in the 1940s to his institutionalization, marriage, and beginning career as a writer.

The structure of A Fan’s Notes has, in place of a linear story, these three unifying elements: The author’s addictions to high-flown humor, alcohol, and the New York Giants. Writing of the days when a person could be institutionalized merely for talking to a television set, Exley reveals a good deal more about the 1950s and ’60s than hackneyed news clips and bleary-eyed retrospectives are able to. It becomes clear in his prose that while certain elements of American society were grabbing attention, the mass of people in the United States didn’t give a rat’s ass for the Revolution and were ready and able to punish those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t do the things that were routinely expected. Exley himself fell decidedly into this latter class; still, whether he is writing of his athletic father’s demise from lung cancer, a chance meeting with future Giants quarterback Frank Gifford (the same who can be seen today, face-lift and all, hosting NFL games on NBC), or the ruin of his marriage, he displays a fully judicious temperament and never seems to write off any of his characters unfairly or maliciously. Reissue or no reissue, this is still not likely to be a book that will be read widely, but then sometimes the best things ought to remain well-kept secrets.