cover image Misfit:: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley

Misfit:: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley

Jonathan Yardley. Random House (NY), $23 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-679-43949-3

Frederick Exley (1929-1992) struggled to publish three books in his mostly drink-sodden life, notably a fictionalized memoir with a football voyeur as its narrator, A Fan's Notes. Here Yardley, the Washington Post book critic, expands a fond obituary into a biography. Exley at 39, after years of living on the largesse of friends and relatives who accepted him as the con artist he was, became a minor celebrity with a novel ostensibly concerning a football fan but really about ""that long malaise, my life,"" a book Yardley describes as ""at heart... a work of autobiography that was slightly altered for... legal rather than editorial reasons."" Yardley elevates the ""raucous and obscene"" fictionalized Exley into ""one of the great characters of American literature, Huck Finn gone alcoholic and dissipated."" At age 40 he was burned out. Thereafter he exploited A Fan's Notes into parasitism on a more posh scale with loyal editors and optimistic publishers. He would write articles and two long-gestating additional books that, to Yardley, ""announce... they are the work of a one-book writer."" In 1989, a newspaper columnist called the suicidally boozing Exley ""downwardly mobile."" Yardley does much to redeem the ""essence of the man, which was a writer,"" a writer who produced what Yardley considers a masterwork. His biography will itself be viewed as a fan's notes. Photos. (Aug.)