Rating: 
Summary: No Amount of Fire or Freshness...
Review: With A Fan's Notes, we enter into the tormented, alcoholic life of Frederick Exley, what he calls a "fictional memoir," and one can only hope,for his own sake, that the story is more a work of fiction than a memoir.The tale begins at the New Parrot Resturaunt in Watertown, New York, just minutes before a New York Giants game where, after a weekend of hard drinking, Freddy has what he thinks is a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital.After that, A Fan's Notes flashes back and forth in time, taking the reader from Watertown, where Exley grew up,to USC, where he has his first brush with fame (by way of meeting a still-in-school Frank Gifford),to Chicago and Florida for various drunken misadventares, back to New York and the sanotarium Avalon Valley (where by now Gifford is a Giant), and finally back home to his mother's davenport.In the telling of his story, Exley writes of cracked alcoholic insanity,desperate financial anxiety, and the shiftless paralization of a hopeless dreamer.But it's not all "finances and romances" or "bad livers and broken hearts."Frederick Exley, in his own words, could never really accept "that even in America failure is a part of life." He was concerned with the longing for fame, and the realization that he would probably spend his life as an unknown, unimportant man. A Fan's Notes is one of the saddest books I have ever read, and it is also one of the best.
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