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...

[Exley leads a] trouble-seeking, trouble-rich existence [in Pages From a Cold Island]. He is always putting, indeed pushing, his foot in it. Everything with him is more than enough, or less than enough; there is no unqualified enough. But as he describes his embarrassing, often comic, occasionally joyful meetings with the strangers he drags or tickles out of the blue, as he tells of the intimacy with the strangers that seems to constitute most of the intimacy he knows, he reminds us that a large part of the...