A severely underrated book about staggering failure, reviewed 37 years later.

A Fan’s Notes
by Frederick Exley
Copyright 1968

Last April, confronted with one of those teenage phases of angst and self-doubt, a friend of mine began to spend every afternoon after school in the local public library instead of loitering outside of the Wawa. (For those unfamiliar with the Philly area, Wawa is like 7-11, but much, much better.) He would amble through the stacks until he found a book that looked halfway decent, and then he would plunk down in an armchair and read until he had to go home for dinner. I went with him once, and he pulled the book he was currently reading off the shelf. He told me the author (Frederick Exley) and title (A Fan’s Notes) and that it was utterly amazing. I didn’t think of it again until July, when I was purchasing literary supplies for the weeklong family camping trip (read: “Bin Bin reads five books in one week”-a-thon) and saw it on the shelf in Barnes & Noble.

Now, I admit that I’m young and inexperienced, but it seems to me that an extremely large portion of literature is about unlucky men and women who lead depressing lives. This book falls squarely into that category. F. E. Exley, our hero, fresh-faced and wide-eyed, leaves college and enters the big, wide world, looking to make a name for himself. The situation rapidly deteriorates, and at the point the book opens, he’s an alcoholic, bitter high school English teacher who is obsessed with the New York Giants.

It’s the story of one long failure. This guy just fails constantly for three hundred pages. He’s in and out of mental hospitals. He spends long periods of time lying on his mother’s couch. He has several failed love affairs including a failed marriage, fails to hold down several jobs, and fails in writing a novel. But while you read on in morbid fascination, he writes everything with such self-deprecating humor and insight that it keeps it from becoming too pathetic.

But in my opinion, the best part of this book is the people he meets. He describes every single one of them in such a way you feel like you’ve just been introduced to a bunch of freaks (because most of them are real characters, if you get my meaning). For example, take Bunny Sue:

“Bunny Sue was nineteen. She had honey-blonde, bobbed hair and candid, near-insolent green eyes. She had a snub, delightful nose, a cool, regal, and tapering neck, a fine, intelligent mouth that covered teeth so startling they might have been cleansed by sun gods. Without any makeup save lipstick, her complexion was as milk flecked with butter, the odor she cast as wholesome as homemade bread. On my first breathless vision of her, I wanted to bury my teeth, Dracula-like, into her flanks, knowing that she would bleed pure butterscotch.”

Holy shit, right? There’s also a fellow named Mr. Blue, a tiny, frail old man, who sells door to door and obsesses over performing cunnilingus, even though he never actually does, and is married to a beast of a woman whom Exley refers to as the U.S.S. Deborah. My favorite character, personally, is his brother-in-law, Bumpy, a brutish, crude man with a deep hatred for cats. The funny thing about him, is at the same time you’re being told about the way he used to tie cats’ tails together and throw them over clotheslines so they clawed each other to death, there is something really genuinely goodhearted about him. The way he interacts with his kids, for example, or the stuff he does to help our hero out.

I also really admire the way Exley puts his words together. It just makes everything that much better. Even the chapter titles are neat: “The Nervous Light of Sunday”, “Cheers for Stout Steve Owens”, and “A Lament for a Conspiracy.” Even though I could see a lot of people not liking this book, it’s definitely the most severely underrated novel I’ve come across. It’s one of my favorite books and no one’s ever heard of it. So it goes, I guess.