In 1968, Frederick Exley, a native of Watertown, N.Y., published his "fictional memoir," A Fan's Notes. That semiautobiographical work chronicled the author's self-destructive behavior and his obsession with New York Giants football legend Frank Gifford. Brock Clarke, a self-confessed fan of Exley's novel, pays homage to it in the story of nine-year-old Watertown resident Miller Le Ray, for whose father Exley's book serves as a disastrously misguided guide to living.
Miller, a precocious child whose advanced reading skills have catapulted him improbably into the seventh grade and whose appetite for the written word is matched only by his imagination ("Making things up was a problem of mine, according to Mother."), has convinced himself that a fortyish man lying comatose in a Veteran's Administration hospital is his father, who he is certain has left the family to enlist in the Army for service in Iraq. He believes with equal fervor that if he finds Frederick Exley he'll be able to awaken the unconscious man. In seeking out Tom Le Ray's literary idol, Miller revisits the scene of incidents in Exley's picaresque book (a seedy motel and neighborhood bar most prominent among them), slowly discovering painful truths about his parents' lives as he struggles to reconcile self-protective myth and reality.
Told in chapters that alternate between Miller's appealing voice ("sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults") and the office notes of a therapist Miller nicknames Dr. Horatio Pahnee, whose treatment can be described charitably as unconventional (he breaks into the Le Ray home and has a not-so-secret crush on Miller's mother, a lawyer who represents woman battered by military men), the novel features two wildly unreliable narrators. In channeling their voices, Clarke's writing displays the distinctive style of Arsonist's Guide, but Exley lacks that novel's antic energy. For it, Clarke has substituted a collection of puzzles that insinuate their way through the story: Is the unconscious man really Miller's father? Why did he leave his family? Did he see combat in Iraq? Who is the mysterious "K" and what is that character's relationship to the Le Ray family? The answers to most of these questions prove elusive, even up to the novel's final page, and it's hard to escape a feeling of frustration at the story's sometimes languid pace.
In a 2007 interview, Brock Clarke observed, "The relationship between truth and fiction is a complicated problem." In this sometimes perplexing story of a troubled contemporary family, Clarke traverses that uncertain territory. Give him credit for his brave willingness to raise provocative issues about what is real and what is not, both in literature and in life, and if only for that reason, Exley's worth reading. One can only hope in his next work he's able to find a more compelling vehicle for his explorations.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In the story of young Miller Le Ray's encounter with Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, adventuresome novelist Brock Clarke explores the often blurry line between truth and fiction.