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 persona, but as a whole, A Fan's Notes is an unmistakable achievement.

At one point in Pages from a Cold Island Exley tells us that some readers of his first book expressed doubts that he would produce anything more because of the exhaustive nature of that initial performance. Their doubts were not entirely groundless, for although Exley has written a second book, the more we read...