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m i s--f i t
---------> BY JONATHAN YARDLEY +++++++++RANDOM HOUSE +++++++++288 PAGES +++++++++NONFICTION BY DWIGHT GARNER | jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post book critic, has spent a sizable chunk of his long career taking the wind out of dry, pointlessly long "laundry list" biographies -- the kind of literary doorstops that require 250 pages merely to get their subject out of short pants. So it's no surprise to read, in Yardley's introduction to his slender new bio of "A Fan's Notes" author Frederick Exley, that he plans to give us an informal portrait of his subject -- "a story instead of a study." The good news is that Yardley really delivers: "Misfit" is the sleekest and most compulsively readable literary biography since "The Anti-Egotist" (1994), Paul Fussell's pointillist life of Kingsley Amis. Part of what makes "Misfit" so entertaining is that Yardley is clearly turned on by his larger-than-life subject. "What a piece of work he was!" Yardley intones about Exley, a nonstop talker, drinker and three-pack-a-day smoker who was among the last generation of American writers "to believe that hard drink, hard living and, if it be so ordained, early death were the appropriate ways of living the literary life." (Exley died in 1992, at age 63.) While in many respects Exley was "a big baby who never grew up" -- a big, blustery lunk, he loved to crash on friends' couches after soaking up all their booze -- Yardley expertly pencils in the pain and insecurity that lurked behind his barfly swagger. The son of a local football legend in a small town in upstate New York, Exley's own dreams of athletic stardom were shattered by a car accident. After returning from the University of Southern California (where he went to study dentistry and came home with an English major), Exley spent several years curled up, à la Beach Boy Brian Wilson, on his mother's couch and in her attic. What no one knew at the time was that Exley was scribbling away on a manuscript that would become "A Fan's Notes" (1968), his masterful novel about the flip side of fame in America -- about being another face in the teeming crowd. The book, about a USC student who obsesses over his star classmate Frank Gifford (yes, that Frank Gifford), explored Exley's ultimate fear, which is perhaps the bedrock fear of the majority of white men in America: that it was his destiny "to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan." (In one of the novel's most moving scenes, the Exley character bumps into Gifford at a campus hamburger joint and fights the urge to shout: "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss ...") Anyone who's read the novel -- a cult favorite that the Modern Library is re-releasing this fall -- won't be troubled by Yardley's assertion that it belongs alongside Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" and Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" as one of "the literary monuments of its time and place."
Exley was never really a success in his lifetime; he was constantly broke, and "A Fan's Notes" found only a small, if fervent, audience. While he published two later books -- both were mediocre -- he also frittered away a good portion of his talent on cheap booze and gassy talk. Worse, his excesses often hurt those around him. (He was a terrible, and occasionally abusive, husband and father.) Yet Yardley never turns him into a soggy, stereotypical American literary burnout. Exley simply had too much spark, too much unfocused life in him. While "all the evidence indicates that he was not a happy man," Yardley writes, "he had a good deal of fun; I am not one to take that lightly, and anyone otherwise inclined does Fred a disservice." What ultimately matters is that, on his own terms, Exley was a success -- his book about failure and anonymity has, ironically enough, provided him with a secure place in America's literary firmament. Fans of smart, sensitive literary biography may want to place "Misfit" in that firmament, too.
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