Modern Library and Biography Reintroduce Exley

With the Modern Library publication in August of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, the small but vocal constituency supporting Exley's first novel has been vindicated. Like another recent Modern Library edition, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Fan's Notes presents a picture of America not as we wish to see it, but as it really is: a conformist society that does not easily tolerate dissent and certainly doesn't encourage the free spirit. Exley's autobiographical narrator, a brilliant misfit of Nabokovian proportions, is one of the truly unforgettable characters in contemporary literature, and an individual whose struggles remain as poignant today as they were in 1968 when the novel was published.

Which leads to the next question: is A Fan's Notes indeed a novel? Jonathan Yardley, book critic and author of a new biography of Exley, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, says no. "These days, as the memoir reigns supreme in publishing, it is easy to forget that, even ten years ago, a memoir was considered a literary dead property - something to be done at the end of a career, not the beginning, and without high hopes for sales or critical attention." It is Yardley's contention, and it seems reasonable, that A Fan's Notes was written as nonfiction and, only at the insistence of a publisher worried about lawsuits, retooled as a novel: a name changed here, some dates and places tweaked there, and, best of all, a transparent disclaimer inserted by Exley himself. Hence we have the author politely asking, "to be judged as a writer of fantasy," while we read about the events that "bear similarity to those of that long malaise, my life..." Don't believe it. A Fan's Notes is Exley's life, and it is a life of tragedy and comedy in equal proportion, a uniquely American life composed in absolutely honest and extraordinary prose. A stamp of approval from the Modern Library is a ticket into the pantheon, and that is good news for readers everywhere. This book is heartbreaking, funny, and beautiful. It deserves to be read.

Here is a particular kind of literary hero who invents a persona on the page, and proceeds to become that invention in life as well. Hemingway, of course, was the grandmaster; but in a less public sphere, Fred Exley was every bit the equal of Papa himself. It is perhaps most accurate to say that Exley was the hero of A Fan's Notes long before it was written, and its prisoner forever after.

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jonathan Yardley's new biography of Exley, Misfit, (Random House, $23.00) presents, for the first time outside of Exley's own "fiction", a picture of one of the strangest literary characters to come down the pike: a self-acknowledged loser who spent most of his time holding forth in one bar or another, a financial disaster who would probably have died on the street had not friends and family habitually supported him, and, most interestingly, the out-of-nowhere author of a stunningly beautiful first novel, a novel so confident in its style and artistry that it is still difficult to believe that he hadn't written anything before.

Particularly for fans of his writing, and also those interested in that literary archetype, the One Book Wonder, Exley's life is a fascinating tale of the artist as outcast, as savant unfit for anything but his work. With none of the accouterments of ordinary postwar American life (employment, fixed address, financial records), Exley's existence must have been extremely difficult to document, but Yardley has done an extraordinary job of reconstructing the meandering path of this eccentric man. As a friend of Exley's, Yardley is sympathetic to the writer's plight, yet the biography pulls no punches. For all his loyalty and humor, Exley could be, well, loathsome. He decided early on that the world - or at least the small world of friends and family - should support his strange existence and, remarkably, it did until the day he died. The payoff for all this indulgence, of course, was the phenomenal achievement of A Fan's Notes. It is a book that would not have been written in a more conventional milieu.

The story that Misfit tells is not pretty, but it is important. It reveals Exley in all his "Fredness" and, in so doing, illuminates the soul of the artist, the one for whom "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Honesty, perhaps, was Frederick Exley's only moral virtue, but that cannot be underestimated - it is the cornerstone of all art.