[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 'literary' only in the sense that anyone who writes is literary now. Exley-the-narrator seeks love and fame; like Gatsby, he believes in the green light of American romanticism; and he finds ashes. Love is blonde Bunny Sue with her butterscotch thighs and sexual expertise, and her mental vacuousness. She lives at Heritage Heights, Chicago. All he can do is look. Fame, too, is for looking at, despite his ambition as a writer. It happens on TV screens: a few have fans, but most are fans of the few. Exley has a dream in which he fights with a younger man, a representative of 'the generation to whom President Johnson has promised his Great Society; the generation which will never know the debilitating shame of poverty, the anguish of defeat, the fateful irony of the unexpected disease'; and as he loses, he sees that the idea of remorse has no place in the young man's dialectic. It's a painful lesson. (p. 155)
Derek Mahon, in The Listener (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1970; reprinted by permission of Derek Mahon), January 29, 1970.
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