A CHARMING MONSTER

By Paul Gray

An odd and, to many readers, intriguing book appeared in 1968. Published as a novel, A Fan's Notes excited considerable curiosity about its previously unknown author, Frederick Exley, and its central character, a hopeless drunk and a lunatic rooter for the pro football New York Giants also named Frederick Exley. Who was this guy, so the question went at the time, the accomplished author or the alcoholic burnout he portrays?

Both, as it turned out, and the Washington Post book critic and columnist Jonathan Yardley engagingly examines this double identity in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House; 255 pages; $23). Yardley makes no inflated claims on behalf of his subject: "Fred was a professional writer, although only one of his three books [A Fan's Notes] will long remain in print." But Exley (1929-1992) intensely interested and exasperated his readers, relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and the victims of his odd-hours telephone monologues, among whom Yardley and this reviewer number themselves. "What a piece of work he was!" Yardley writes, and then convincingly sets forth the evidence.

Bad work, mostly, although Yardley renders this verdict gently. A normal boy growing up in Watertown, N.Y., Exley took some hits during his senior year in high school--the death of his football-hero father, an auto accident that ended his own dreams of gridiron glory--and, after majoring in English at the University of Southern California, eventually became a charming monster of self-indulgence. Women, beginning with his mother, lined up to mother him. He had two wives and physically abused them both. He drank incessantly: "There are people who knew him for years and never, to their knowledge, saw him sober." Insofar as such behavior can be redeemed, Exley did so through his writing skill and his sense of humor, which was usually aimed at his munificent failings. As a person he was largely dreadful, but as a character in Yardley's book he commands attention.

--By Paul Gray