University of Virginia Library

'Fictional Memoirs'
Hits American Dream

—Ed.

By James R. Burkhardt

Frederick Exley's "Fictional
Memoir" not only questions
present day America and the
illusions and unavailability of the
American Dream, but also the
contemporary idea of history. Like
Frank Conroy's Stop Time, John
Fowles' The French Lieutenant's
Woman, John Hawkes' The Lime
Twig, and the recent fiction of
William Gass, Mailer, Coover,
Vonnegut, and Bartheime, Exley
emphasizes the belief that there are
no longer any distinctions between
"personal history" and "objective
history." Since history can only be
regarded as a recreation of past
events, all history tends toward
fiction; Exley cancels out any
separation between fictional
memory and straightforward
autobiography. Exley puts
everything out front and while the
risks are immense, the resulting
vision is lucid and untracked.

The importance of this novel is
the use of the narrator, a fictional
character by the name of Frederick
Exley, for it is he who is both
fiction and fact. By using the
conventional autobiographical
framework and calling it fiction,
Exley gains the freedom of
exploring his past experiences
imaginatively. It is this freedom
which makes A Fan's Notes such a
powerful and moving book.

The scene of Exley's fictional
autobiography is the static and
unshaded America of the fifties,
when success seemed the opposite
of failure and the soft down of a
Vassar girl was a tangible reward as
well as a seductively schizophrenic
ideal. In dealing with his
involvement in this, Exley never
backs off, but runs headlong at the
whole projection, his pain and loss
constituting the stuff of his
connections until they too dissolve
into madness. The only salvation is
to acknowledge the disintegration.
The book therefore doesn't
progress; It unfolds, self-laceration
upon self-laceration.

But hope is never really
forgotten, and that is perhaps the
real source of despair. With a kind
of fantastic innocence, Exley
manages to draw humor from his
defeats and humiliations, and this
in turn increases the anguish.
Exley's slide down the spiral of
self-destruction (caused by the
stifling American society in which
he lives) isn't without a good deal
of assertion and judgment on the
American experience, but this
assertiveness is never, to Exley's
credit, arrogant:

"Was I, too, insane? It was a
difficult admission to make but I
am glad that I made it: Later I
came to believe that this admission
about myself may be the only
redemption in America."

The implications of Exley's
novel are important for us now, as
we enter this new decade. Exley
and other contemporary authors
are asking us to look closer at
ourselves, the country in which we
live, and our sense of history. Exley
Insists upon the secret life of
imagination as a means of surviving,
since real external freedom is all
but impossible in America. His
entire world is saved by the game
(football) the game viewed
privately on television. The "game"
becomes, finally, a strategy for life;
we can survive only with an acute
and active private imagination.

Exley's book is, therefore, a
work of the imagination - a
fiction. And this separates Exley
the author from Exley the fiction;
the implication is that fiction is
woven into all and that there is a
close relationship between the
internally and externally of an
event. An event is unknowable
except for that person who has
lived it. Thus, the author becomes
narrator because both are
inseparable.

A Fan's Notes, which won the
1968 Faulkner Award for the best
first novel, stands with books like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Cat's Cradle, and Trout Fishing in
America, as one of the important
statements about the past, present,
and future of the American
experiment. It is a comic,
passionate, personal vision of our
times.