Empty Pages

BY NATURE, Fred Exley is a fan. His first book. A Fan's Notes, is a portrait of his life as an outsider and a wanderer whose only solace comes from cheering on his personal hero. The Fiff (Frank Gifford of the N.Y. Giants), every Sunday afternoon. His fate is to "sit in the stands with most men and exalt the exploits of others."

From one standpoint. A Fan's Notes is a chronicle of personal failure--Exley is a middle-aged alcoholic who tries to make ends meet by teaching writing and literature to college kids. He has been in and out of an insane asylum, gone through two marriages, and now he spends most days hovering over a drink. His life, by his own admission, is a waste. With one exception: Exley can write about his problems, failures and feeling of inadequacy with honesty and wit.

Very few have Exley's capacity to write a personal narrative without turning it into a sudsy melodrama or confessional. His self-deprecating humor and disciplined writing style help him retain perspective, and maybe it's easier for him precisely because he's always been an outsider.

Exley's major problem is his inability to latch on--to his wife or jobs or American life. Somehow he was never bequeathed the necessary ambition or stamina. Because he has no roots, he travels, and Notes is full of encounters with odd characters that evoke a bittersweet mixture of sympathy and contempt. The strangest of the lot is Mr. Blue, an aging door-to-door salesman still capable of doing 50 push-ups on request, who lives with a six-foot woman gymnastics teacher. But Exley also makes more "ordinary" encounters memorable. And the web of brawls begun over football arguments, debauched weekends, overnight stays on couches and endless journeys are held together by forceful personal insights, culminating in the realization of his destiny as a fan. Even when Exley offers nothing new--he learns from his first term at the State Hospital that you stay longer if you tell the doctors the truth--his story--telling carries him through. There is always one anecdote, one character or one revelation in the episode that makes it worthwhile.

A FAN'S NOTES brought Exley critical acclaim and a few literary awards, but not the fabled pot at the end of the rainbow. A bit miffed and fifteen thousand dollars in debt. Exley began another book, hoping to cash in on his newly acquired reputation.

But, unfortunately, Exley had run out of steam, or at least material. All of his best thoughts and experiences are in Notes, and for all its attempts at coy humor and shocking candor, Pages from a Cold Island is without substance. Perhaps to compensate, or to fill the cold pages. Exley turned to a self-indulgent approach full of distracting asides which reduce Pages to a book about writing the book.

The most interesting thing Exley's parenthetical comments reveal is that he knew from the outset that Pages wasn't working. Realizing it only contained tidbits of his life and occasional references to A Fan's Notes and with the debts still looming overhead. Exley banished the 480 pages of typescript to the back of his rusting Chevy and began a personal odyssey in search of material. But the people he meets are tedious, and by this time his reflections have become predictable. If anything, Exley seems too detached, to the point of being callous.

IN his search for material Exley tries to secure interviews with Gloria Steinem. Norman Mailer, and people close to a favorite author, Edmund Wilson. The interviews, however, don't help. For one thing Exley is not an experienced interviewer, and he admits he's too scared of Steinem to ask the one interesting question he prepared, so unless you're interested in knowing that Steinem is difficult to get an appointment with, and what Exley wore and what they ate for lunch, there's very little there.

Exley makes the mistake of assuming that conversations with people in the lime-light are necessarily interesting; he's much better off writing about unknowns whom he's closer to.

The tragedy is that Exley, a good writer and teacher, published Pages knowing it wasn't any good. Where Notes is a well-integrated, sensitive book, Pages is a tedious pastiche abounding with descriptions of Exley and his favorite bartender reading the morning mail--and Exley knows better.