Frederick Exley's literary output over some twenty years amounts to only three novels: A Fan's Notes (1968), Pages from a Cold Island (1975), and Last Notes from Home (1988), plus enough magazine articles to fill a small volume. None of his novels has be...

It's a cliché: the tough guy with the gentle touch. One of New York's recurring characters, a man's man who knows how to be sensitive with the ladies. But that was Jerry Orbach-or Lennie Briscoe, or Billy Flynn, or Mack the Knife, or any one...

While Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes envisions a culture every bit as inhumane as we find elsewhere in contemporary fiction, his novel represents a significant turn. Exley's America may fail and brutalize him, but he comes to momentary recognitions of his own not insignificant failings. Simply, unlike his fellow protagonists, Exley in A Fan's Notes carries the burden of guilt; indeed, he at times equates remorse with the very conditions of humanity…. Exley cannot always s...

A Fan's Notes is both a funny and a sad book, exploring the American obsession with "making it." It contains some splendid writing, a host of memorable tales and character sketches, and, above all, a sense of a man who has lived and suffered. At times the book tends toward inflated prose and overdrawn scenes and sections (the chapter on "Mr. Blue," for example, is not important enough to warrant such space), and we do occasionally grow weary of the self-deprecating Exley p...

[A Fan's Notes is] a work of depth and seriousness—a moving, richly humorous record of humiliation and perseverance. Perhaps only in tightrope America, where to trip once is to die more than a little, can one immediately recognise loneliness as a metaphysical condition. This, almost, is what Exley does, with a bitterness, a wild obscenity and a slow undertow of unkillable love that recalls Céline. He is conscious of other American masters (Melville, Scott Fitzgerald), but he is '...