"Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do."
A grim, sardonic view of the obstacles involved in navigating 1960s America, "A Fan's Notes" is alternatively heartbreaking, hilarious, hopeful, and horror-inducing. Frederick Exley's semi-autobiographic account pulls no punches in addressing mental illness, alcoholism, and obsession.
The matter-of-fact prose belies the magnitude of almost casual sexual battery, racism, and institutional abuse. The result can be borderline overwhelming and depressing, but well worth the effort.
"'For my heart,' I wrote, 'will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the criminal, the painter, the lunatic, with all whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life.'"
I found a number of similarities to Charles Bukowski in Exley's prose. As a huge fan of Bukowski's "Ham on Rye" (the 2011 Scootie winner) and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," I quickly embraced Exley's style as well.
"After my day's work I drank martinis in the cocktail lounge of the Broadmoor, waiting for the blonde who never came, and for whom I never gave up waiting, such was my optimism and my contentment."
The cyclical nature of the narrator's brief stretches of holding his head above the water before the inevitable descent that sees him betray family and friends can be difficult to read, but the undeniably comedic descriptions have the reader giggling almost against their better judgment.
"I felt not unlike a man who eats too fast, drinks too much, occasionally neglects his teeth and fingernails, is given to a pensive scratching of his vital parts, lets rip with a not infrequent fart, and wakes up one morning to find himself smack in the middle of a Saturday Evening Post cover, carving the goddam Thanksgiving turkey for a family he has never seen before."
Exley's edgy material and his use of a passion for the New York Giants to redirect his manic energies make "A Fan's Notes" an essential read -- and one I wish I could have come across much earlier in life.
"I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny -- unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd -- to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan."
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