Surreal Odyssey

By Paul Gray

LAST NOTES FROM HOME

by Frederick Exley

Random House; 397 pages; $18.95

A man named Frederick Exley sits on the balcony outside his room in a Honolulu hotel, sipping vodka and heating up steaks on a portable grill. It is his wedding night, and he and his bride have just had their first tiff as husband and wife. Eventually, she stops sulking and joins him. "Dropping to her knees," Exley writes, "she grasped my bare thighs and begged me to please, please, please remove the grilling fork from my chest." Exley, in other words, is up to the same trick he demonstrated in A Fan's Notes (1968) and Pages from a Cold Island (1975): spinning out fanciful autobiographical legends that regularly leave the author skewered.

Last Notes from Home adds flesh to the fictive narrator of the two earlier books. Literally. "The dude I call Exley," as the writer refers to his hero, stands 5 ft. 10 in. and occasionally balloons up to 180 lbs., thanks to the metabolism of aging, innumerable beers and a quart or so of liquor a day. He still lives in his native upstate New York, where he keeps his mother company in her house. When he learns that his older brother William, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, is dying of cancer in Hawaii, Exley hops a plane along with "the old lady," and another nonstop monologue is under way.

Ostensibly, this pilgrimage to pay respects to and then bury the dead is Exley's story. In practice, the narrative evolves into a surrealistic odyssey. On his flight, Exley bumps into James Seamus Finbarr O'Twoomey, a preposterously gross Irishman with an equally incredible brogue ("Frederick, me lurverly, there you go again") who will later hold the hapless author hostage in a Pacific paradise. Also aboard is the future Mrs. Exley, a murderously sexy flight attendant named Robin.

While keeping all these odd characters, including his own, in frenetic movement, Exley again demonstrates his skill at hallucinatory free association. The point of the exercise may be lost on those who expect stories to make sense. For Exley addicts, there is another concern. He calls Last Notes "the third volume of my trilogy." Why he should stop where this book does, with the narrator newly married and looking for trouble, requires a full explanation. At the very least, Exley should go for a tetralogy.