Last Notes from Home | Literary Precedents

Last Notes from Home Literary Precedents

In his skillful, irreverent mesh of fact and fiction, Exley joins a small cohort of his peers — E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer — pushing the boundaries of genre in this way. Too, he prefigures a younger group of disaffected, drugged, and disillusioned writers, who likewise call "the dream" a "lie": Jim Carroll, Jay Mclnerney, Brett Easton Ellis. Curiously, Exley's drug-of-choice, alcohol, sets him at odds somewhat with the psychedelic writers of his age, and seems anachronistic, almost provincial, in contrast. Nonetheless, fully inscribed in a gendered, genteel, Eurocentric tradition, Exley never adopts a voice other than what is essentially his: that of a white, male, American writer.