Exley won several awards and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. I won’t get into detail, but I was very satisfied with one example of this in particular. He called 'A Fans Notes' 'a singularly moving, entertaining, funny book.' Mr. Sometimes the novel gets very very bogged down, and then sometimes it has Exley yelling full-blast at people who miss the point of some important novels. He’s also watching the world around him slowly lose its mind, and he’s not sure if he wants to do that or not himself. Never a best seller, now in print largely thanks to its enshrinement in the Modern Library, A Fan’s Notes is a specialty item in the way The Big Lebowski is a cult movie. This is a book positioned in the 1950s through the 1960s and Exley’s narrator is trying to figure out who he is as a writer and who he wants to be. A Fan’s Notes, Exley’s landmark 1968 personal history and fictional memoir, pivoted on the author’s lifelong obsession with Gifford. There’s a lot of drinking there’s a lot of talking and there’s especially a lot of reading. They both come off as true enough, and impossibly untrue at times. He goes into detail about his obsession with football, especially with Frank Gifford, who acts as a kind of avatar of Exley’s desires for himself, and as a stand-in father figure (even though Exley and Gifford are the same age) and becomes a totem. He’s escaping a bit from his weekly teaching gig, one that he secured by promising the principal he would never create too much of a problem with his drinking, as his reputation preceded him. He is completely enamored by both aspects. Both parts of that event seems equally important. He is rushed to the hospital, where he meets Dr. Exley then writes of an incident - what, at the time, he believed to be a heart attack. We begin with our narrator, one Frederick Exley, going to a bar on a Sunday to drink while watching football. There, he recounts his weekly life as a teacher at Glacial Falls the crooked set-up of a school system he belonged to at that moment - and his drunken weekends watching football in his hometown bar.

A brilliant novel that teeters between somewhat kilter and completely off-kilter at times.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley