AuntShecky
02-25-2012, 07:22 PM
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. New York: Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 1988. (Originally published in 1968.)
During last month’s frenzied run up to Super Bowl XLVI, the New York Daily News offered a short list of football-related reading material. In his short article Alexander Nazaryan mentions that Dom DeLillo’s End Zone and Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights are worthy offerings but perhaps not “football’s finest, The Natural of the gridiron[.] That title surely goes to Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.”
Nazaryan is quite correct in acknowledging the excellence of Exley’s self-described “fictional memoir,” but it may be a bit misleading to characterize the work as a “football” novel. True, Exley’s devotion to the NY Giants in general and Frank Gifford in particular is a recurrent motif, but it enters in the narrative more or less tangentially. While Exley had met Frank Gifford when both men were students at USC, he subsequently followed Gifford’s career with the Giants down to the minutest detail. Yet the eloquent prose in this book is not the literary equivalent of Sports Illustrated but rather focuses on Exley himself – a no-holds-barred revelation of the soul of a man whose aspirations far exceed fruition, thus suffering through the shattering of his illusions.
Born in Watertown, a working class city in northwest New York State, Frederick Exley (1929-1992) is a man whose emotional development stopped at age nine upon the death of his father, himself a small-town football hero. Somehow the young Exley cobbles together a college degree from his time at USC as well as a few smaller Eastern campuses.
Unable to come to terms with the moral compromises required of public relations and advertising careers, Exley bounces from New York to Chicago, but frequently ends up back in his own small town, more specifically on his mother’s couch. The davenport symbolizes the nearly incurable paralysis that is a symptom of severe depression. Exley intersperses harrowing accounts of his confinement in mental institutions, and to his credit, never disputes the fact that he is indeed “sick.” While he has sympathy for his fellow patients, offering some of them a compassionate ear, Exley believes himself saner in comparison. He harbors mental reservations about his inner core, perhaps as a way to trick himself into believing that he remains in control of his life. Thus he adopts a ploy similar to that of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (“overcome ‘em with yesses”):
“Yes, I was insane. Still, I did not despise my oddness, my deviations, those things which made me, after all, me. I wanted to preserve these things. To do it, I had to get out of that place. Then–as quickly as the rage had come over me–I suddenly knew how to do it. I would be the kind of man I suspected the world wanted me to be. I played the game with all the loathing the benevolent doctor had put at my command.” (pp. 88-89.)
But becoming the man the world wanted him to be comes at a heavy price. While his idolization of Gifford includes a desire to emulate him, the American ideal of success requires certain compromises which he can not accept. Sitting next to a typical American family during a Giants game at the Polo Grounds, Exley observes:
Surely this was the coveted America, these perennially rosy cheeks and untroubled azure eyes, these toothy smiles without warmth, eyes without gravity, eyes incapable of even the censorious scowl, eyes , for that matter, incapable of mustering even a look of perplexity. Well, it was not the America I coveted.
Even though his book centers upon his own difficulties and posturing, Exley paradoxically avoids wallowing in complete self-absorption. For it is at this point that Exley reveals a moment of exquisite self-knowledge:
I was well aware of my pretensions to intellectuality and that the hues of my being were preponderantly and inordinately somber–a somberness that was no doubt governed not a little by self-pity. (p. 240.)
Exley attempts to make a raid on his inherent “somberness” with the one constant element of his adulthood–alcohol. It is no secret that, apart from a incident in which he obsessively cranks out hundreds of thousands of words never to be collated within a unifying theme, Exley squanders the time he could have spent writing with drinking both in solitude and more dramatically in various drinking establishments around Watertown, where on Sunday afternoons he holds court with booze-fueled running commentary on the Giants game of the week. (He further elaborates on this addiction in Pages from a Cold Island, the first of his two other published works, neither of which achieved the critical acclaim of his debut.) In A Fan’s Notes, however, alcohol is so prominent that it is almost a major character, like “Mr. Blue,” the aluminum siding salesman with a highly-specialized prurient curiosity and “The Counselor,” the unconventional lawyer, couch provider, and enabler.
It should come as no surprise that in the grip of his illness, Exley even lets his oldest friend from childhood down. “The Counselor” is also Exley’s “co-conspirator against exclusiveness,” not only for admittance to football games but perhaps to respectable society at large. As the esteemed critic Jonathan Yardley titled his biography, Misfit, Exley was unable to wedge himself into the American promise of upward mobility, thus tackled by the realization that he will always be an “outsider” looking in. This is the inherent theme of the book, and the most powerful passage comes on page 357, where Exley finally realizes what it means to be a “fan.”
In addition to the disturbing elements which the author courageously analyzes, Exley’s prose style is idiosyncratic, aiming for ponderous eloquence while depicting degradation. There is little overt profanity in the material, but his esoteric word choices almost at times seeming to have been consciously chosen for their abstruseness. This is not to suggest that the book is devoid of brilliant flashes of mordant humor.
Another apparent,– albeit superficial -- flaw, is Exley’s self-styled superiority, developed perhaps as a defense mechanism, but displayed in a tendency to be overly judgmental and dismissive. A failed romance forms a pivotal chapter in the book; ultimately, Exley’s sentiment sours toward “Bunny Sue,”the idealized cheerleader from a tony Chicago suburb. As an excuse for the inevitable break-up, Exley notes that she has used too many exclamation points in her love letters, similar to an incident in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Some contemporary readers may be put off by his pre-women’s liberation, “Mad Man” attitude toward women, though it should be kept in mind that the book merely reflects the age in which it was written. While initially off-putting, neither stylistic quirkiness nor apparent misogyny are enough to diminish the compelling power of this narrative. Exley is not afraid to show himself an insufferable boor, a cad, someone whom you’d never want to date. Yet you will fall head over heels in love with his book.
During last month’s frenzied run up to Super Bowl XLVI, the New York Daily News offered a short list of football-related reading material. In his short article Alexander Nazaryan mentions that Dom DeLillo’s End Zone and Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights are worthy offerings but perhaps not “football’s finest, The Natural of the gridiron[.] That title surely goes to Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.”
Nazaryan is quite correct in acknowledging the excellence of Exley’s self-described “fictional memoir,” but it may be a bit misleading to characterize the work as a “football” novel. True, Exley’s devotion to the NY Giants in general and Frank Gifford in particular is a recurrent motif, but it enters in the narrative more or less tangentially. While Exley had met Frank Gifford when both men were students at USC, he subsequently followed Gifford’s career with the Giants down to the minutest detail. Yet the eloquent prose in this book is not the literary equivalent of Sports Illustrated but rather focuses on Exley himself – a no-holds-barred revelation of the soul of a man whose aspirations far exceed fruition, thus suffering through the shattering of his illusions.
Born in Watertown, a working class city in northwest New York State, Frederick Exley (1929-1992) is a man whose emotional development stopped at age nine upon the death of his father, himself a small-town football hero. Somehow the young Exley cobbles together a college degree from his time at USC as well as a few smaller Eastern campuses.
Unable to come to terms with the moral compromises required of public relations and advertising careers, Exley bounces from New York to Chicago, but frequently ends up back in his own small town, more specifically on his mother’s couch. The davenport symbolizes the nearly incurable paralysis that is a symptom of severe depression. Exley intersperses harrowing accounts of his confinement in mental institutions, and to his credit, never disputes the fact that he is indeed “sick.” While he has sympathy for his fellow patients, offering some of them a compassionate ear, Exley believes himself saner in comparison. He harbors mental reservations about his inner core, perhaps as a way to trick himself into believing that he remains in control of his life. Thus he adopts a ploy similar to that of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (“overcome ‘em with yesses”):
“Yes, I was insane. Still, I did not despise my oddness, my deviations, those things which made me, after all, me. I wanted to preserve these things. To do it, I had to get out of that place. Then–as quickly as the rage had come over me–I suddenly knew how to do it. I would be the kind of man I suspected the world wanted me to be. I played the game with all the loathing the benevolent doctor had put at my command.” (pp. 88-89.)
But becoming the man the world wanted him to be comes at a heavy price. While his idolization of Gifford includes a desire to emulate him, the American ideal of success requires certain compromises which he can not accept. Sitting next to a typical American family during a Giants game at the Polo Grounds, Exley observes:
Surely this was the coveted America, these perennially rosy cheeks and untroubled azure eyes, these toothy smiles without warmth, eyes without gravity, eyes incapable of even the censorious scowl, eyes , for that matter, incapable of mustering even a look of perplexity. Well, it was not the America I coveted.
Even though his book centers upon his own difficulties and posturing, Exley paradoxically avoids wallowing in complete self-absorption. For it is at this point that Exley reveals a moment of exquisite self-knowledge:
I was well aware of my pretensions to intellectuality and that the hues of my being were preponderantly and inordinately somber–a somberness that was no doubt governed not a little by self-pity. (p. 240.)
Exley attempts to make a raid on his inherent “somberness” with the one constant element of his adulthood–alcohol. It is no secret that, apart from a incident in which he obsessively cranks out hundreds of thousands of words never to be collated within a unifying theme, Exley squanders the time he could have spent writing with drinking both in solitude and more dramatically in various drinking establishments around Watertown, where on Sunday afternoons he holds court with booze-fueled running commentary on the Giants game of the week. (He further elaborates on this addiction in Pages from a Cold Island, the first of his two other published works, neither of which achieved the critical acclaim of his debut.) In A Fan’s Notes, however, alcohol is so prominent that it is almost a major character, like “Mr. Blue,” the aluminum siding salesman with a highly-specialized prurient curiosity and “The Counselor,” the unconventional lawyer, couch provider, and enabler.
It should come as no surprise that in the grip of his illness, Exley even lets his oldest friend from childhood down. “The Counselor” is also Exley’s “co-conspirator against exclusiveness,” not only for admittance to football games but perhaps to respectable society at large. As the esteemed critic Jonathan Yardley titled his biography, Misfit, Exley was unable to wedge himself into the American promise of upward mobility, thus tackled by the realization that he will always be an “outsider” looking in. This is the inherent theme of the book, and the most powerful passage comes on page 357, where Exley finally realizes what it means to be a “fan.”
In addition to the disturbing elements which the author courageously analyzes, Exley’s prose style is idiosyncratic, aiming for ponderous eloquence while depicting degradation. There is little overt profanity in the material, but his esoteric word choices almost at times seeming to have been consciously chosen for their abstruseness. This is not to suggest that the book is devoid of brilliant flashes of mordant humor.
Another apparent,– albeit superficial -- flaw, is Exley’s self-styled superiority, developed perhaps as a defense mechanism, but displayed in a tendency to be overly judgmental and dismissive. A failed romance forms a pivotal chapter in the book; ultimately, Exley’s sentiment sours toward “Bunny Sue,”the idealized cheerleader from a tony Chicago suburb. As an excuse for the inevitable break-up, Exley notes that she has used too many exclamation points in her love letters, similar to an incident in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Some contemporary readers may be put off by his pre-women’s liberation, “Mad Man” attitude toward women, though it should be kept in mind that the book merely reflects the age in which it was written. While initially off-putting, neither stylistic quirkiness nor apparent misogyny are enough to diminish the compelling power of this narrative. Exley is not afraid to show himself an insufferable boor, a cad, someone whom you’d never want to date. Yet you will fall head over heels in love with his book.