Exley, p.31
Exley, page 31
“Miller …,” Dr. ______ started to say, but I wasn’t listening to him. Because suddenly I had an idea. After all, I had lied about Dr. ______ being Dr. Pahnee and then Exley. Suppose I had also lied about my dad being my dad? Suppose everything everyone else had been saying about him and me were true? I closed my eyes one last time. Please don’t be my dad, I said to my dad in my head. I tried to imagine that everyone was right, that the guy next to me was not actually my dad; I tried to imagine that he was just some random soldier I pretended was my dad. I tried to imagine that what Dr. ______ and Mother had been saying all along was true. I tried to imagine my dad at that moment with K. in her house, wherever that was. I tried to imagine him with some other woman, lying on some other woman’s davenport in some other woman’s house in some other town. I tried to imagine my dad drinking vodka Presbyterians at the Crystal or at some other bar at that very moment. It’s not working, my head told me. I can’t imagine that. I just can’t. And then I told my head, But can you imagine he’s dead? Can you imagine what life will be like if this really is your dad and he really is dead?
I opened my eyes, hopped off the bed, and walked toward Dr. ______. I must have had a scary expression on my face, because he took a step backward and put Exley’s book up in front of him like a shield.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Dr. ______,” I said, “but I’ve been lying to you and to everyone else. This isn’t who I said it was.”
“Oh, Miller,” Dr. ______ said, his voice full of something—pity or disappointment, I couldn’t tell which. “I know it’s your dad. I read his bracelet.”
“I made that myself!” I said. I could hear how wild and unreliable my voice sounded. So I took a breath, then another, and then said as calmly as I could, “The bracelet is a fake, just like the letters, just like the call from the hospital, just like everything.”
“Miller,” Dr. ______ said. “It’s too late. Your dad is dead and you can’t bring him back. This is only going to make things worse. Please don’t do this.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true,” I said. “This is not my dad.”
The Truth
I ran out of the hospital, and Dr. ______ ran after me, and for a little while we just stood there on Washington Street. It was still snowing like crazy. There was no wind. There were no snowplows or snow shovelers or snowblowers yet. There was just snow. The trees were bending under the weight of it; the roads were covered with it. People walking in and out of the hospital kept looking up at the falling snow and shaking their heads and laughing, like they just couldn’t believe it. “It’s only November!” they kept saying. They sounded happy, the way they wouldn’t five months from now when they’d be saying, “It’s fuckin’ April!” Then they walked into the hospital, or into the snow, and disappeared. You couldn’t see anything clearly except the snow—not the buildings, not the guys smoking outside the YMCA, not the Public Square. I’d never, ever seen Watertown look so beautiful. I thought of the man I’d pretended was my dad, the man who was dead in the VA hospital. I knew what the minister would say at his funeral; I knew I was supposed to feel grateful to the man. But I didn’t feel grateful. I felt so sad and lonely for him. Because he would never see how beautiful Watertown was in the snow. He would never know about Exley; he would never know that I’d read A Fan’s Notes to him in the hospital. He would never even know who I was or who I wanted him to be. He would never know that if I couldn’t find my dad and persuade Mother to let him come home, I would have been proud to have him be my dad. He would never know how good a dad he might have been to me, how good a son I might have been to him. He would never know what life would have been like if he hadn’t gone to Iraq in reality but had just gone there in my head instead.
“Are you going to help me look for my dad?” I asked Dr. ______, but it didn’t seem like he was listening to me. He was peering through the snow at someone walking toward us across Washington Street. “Oh my lord,” he said when the person got a little closer.
“What?” I said, but by then I could see who it was, too: it was Mother. This was Thursday, and she was wearing her Thursday clothes: a long black skirt and a black blazer and a black overcoat. My dad always told Mother on Thursdays that she looked like she was going to a funeral. When I remembered that, my throat felt all of a sudden full, like when you eat something too quickly and aren’t able to swallow every bit of it. To make the feeling go away, I started talking really fast: about how the guy inside the VA hospital was dead, but that it was OK, because she was right, he wasn’t my dad, I had lied about that, I had made that up, just like I had made up those letters, just like I had made up everything until now. “I know my dad has done some bad things,” I told her. “I know he’s hurt you, like I’ve hurt you. I know he’s lied to you, like I’ve lied to you. But at least he isn’t dead. At least he didn’t go out and die on us. I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to be like the guy in the VA hospital. I don’t want him to die somewhere far away from home without us. I know you don’t love him the way I love him. But he’s my only dad. He’s the only one I want. Please let me and Dr. ______ try to find him. Please let him come home.”
My mom listened to me talk like a deaf person would: she watched my mouth, not my eyes. When I was done talking, she hugged me. “Oh, Miller, I can’t believe you finally lost a tooth,” my mom said to my shoulder. “On your birthday, too.”
“I know,” I said. I didn’t want to mention that Harold had knocked it out, because I didn’t want her to stop hugging me. For the first time, I felt like I needed her, the way I’d always needed my dad. But she did stop hugging me finally. She stood up and smiled weakly at Dr. ______, who smiled weakly back. It was like they hadn’t expected to run into each other here and were sad about that.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.
“The VA hospital called me, Miller,” she said. She tried to hug me again, but I wouldn’t let her.
“They shouldn’t have,” I said. “Like I said, you were right. That guy wasn’t my dad. I lied about that. I don’t even know who the guy was.”
“You do know,” my mom said. “And you were right about your dad. He did go to Iraq.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “Stop it.”
“And he didn’t go to Iraq because you read Exley’s book, either,” she said. She was looking at Dr. ______ now. I wanted him to stop her, to say, Better not tell him. Except he couldn’t say that, because only Dr. Pahnee said that, and Dr. ______ was Dr. ______, not Dr. Pahnee. Anyway, Dr. ______ didn’t say, Better not tell him, or anything else. He just nodded, Go on, then looked up into the falling snow. “He went to Iraq because he wanted us to be proud of him.”
“But I already was,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But I wasn’t, and he thought I would be if he went. And that’s the other reason. He went to Iraq because of K. But K. wasn’t one of his students.”
“Stop it,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m telling you the truth,” she said, but softly, and not like she wanted to be congratulated for telling it.
“Please don’t do that,” I said. I thought that if my mom stopped talking right then, then everything might still be OK: that I would persuade Dr. ______ to pretend to be Exley again, because I thought my dad would like that, and Exley and I would go find my dad and bring him home and that would end up being our truth, and not the truth my mom was trying to tell me. In one truth, I could see my dad, my mom, Exley, and me. But in the other truth, I could see nothing. I don’t mean that it was empty. I mean that it was full of everything I couldn’t stand to see: my mom, and me, and everyone like us, and all the people, places, and things we couldn’t live with or without. “Please don’t say anything else,” I told my mom. But she did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wouldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t first read and loved Frederick Exley’s great “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes and been convinced that everyone else should read and love it, too; and I couldn’t have written this book without the help of Jonathan Yardley’s invaluable biography of Exley, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley. There is a character named Yardley in Exley who sometimes speaks in direct quotations from Misfit; there is also a character named Exley in Exley who (along with other characters) sometimes speaks in direct quotations from A Fan’s Notes. When this happens, I’ve punctuated their dialogue like so —“ ‘ . . .’ ” — so that there should be no question about the original source. Likewise, when my two first-person narrators quote or paraphrase lines from A Fan’s Notes, I’ve labored to make sure that the source is clear, either from the context or by direct reference to the book.
So, thanks to Mr. Yardley, and thanks beyond thanks to the late Mr. Exley and his sisters Fran and Connie; his niece Helen; his nephews Chris, Ed, and Kurt; and all their families, and also to his fellow Watertownians, who were such good hosts to me.
Thanks also to Michael Griffith, Keith Morris, and Trent Stewart; Mark Blask and Liz Bell Young; my colleagues at Bowdoin College and the University of Cincinnati; the National Endowment for the Arts and the Taft Foundation for their invaluable financial support; the good people in charge of the Exley Archives and Special Collections at the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library; Ben George and David Gessner, who published a section of this novel — in somewhat different form — as the short story “Our Pointy Boots” in Ecotone, and Bill Henderson, who reprinted the story in his Pushcart Prize anthology; Michael Fauver and Russell Valentino, who published a section of this novel — also in somewhat different form — as the short story “Knock Knock” in The Iowa Review; Heidi Julavits for publishing an essay of mine about Exley in The Believer; everyone at Algonquin, especially my terrific, and terrifically patient, editor, Chuck Adams; my excellent agents Elizabeth Sheinkman, Felicity Blunt, and Betsy Robbins; and as always, my family, especially Lane.
Exley
A Fan’s Confession
(A Note from the Author)
Questions for Discussion
A Fan’s Confession
(A Note from the Author)
I first read Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes in the summer of 1993. I was at my parents’ house in upstate New York. I say “my parents’ house” and not “my house” because I was of an age where I should have had my own house, but I didn’t. I also was of an age where I was too old to think of the entire summer as “my summer vacation,” but I did. Perhaps it doesn’t need saying that I was in college, again, still. I was underemployed and overeducated. A loser, in other words.
Being a loser will make you feel insane. I felt insane, a little, and had enough residual inherited Protestant work ethic left in me to know that I might feel better if I did something productive. So I decided to read a book (you know you’re insane, and a loser, when you think of reading a book as doing something productive), and the book I decided to read was A Fan’s Notes. I don’t remember how I came to own the book. It wasn’t my parents’ book, but I don’t remember buying it, or someone giving it to me. It just sort of dropped into my life, the way books do when you need them the most.
Anyway, I plopped myself down on a chaise longue in my parents’ yard, opened a beer, and began reading. I know a lot of readers, when praising a book, claim that it speaks to them. Those same readers might also claim that they saw themselves in the book. But those readers have nothing on me and A Fan’s Notes, which, the cover told me, was a “fictional memoir” about Frederick Exley, an overeducated and underemployed “youngish-old” man in Watertown, New York (a larger, colder, rougher military base town not even two hours north of my parents’ house), who basically plopped himself down on his mother’s davenport every day and read books and drank booze and went insane. There were some differences between us: Exley was obsessed with the New York Giants in general (and Frank Gifford in particular), whereas I was made loony by the Boston Red Sox (who in those days were the gold standard for long-term loserdom); and Exley had been institutionalized in insane asylums several times, while I hadn’t (and still haven’t, yet). Basically, Exley was a worse-off version of me (much worse, as it turned out: he’d died from his excesses a year earlier, although I didn’t know that yet). But Exley was also a great writer: sometimes he sounded like a guy who didn’t know he wasn’t on stage (“I saw myself a kind of Owl-Eyes come to Gatsby’s wake . . . sequestered from the one or two mourners, a curiosity weeping great, excited tears in the blue shade of funereal elms”), and sometimes he sounded like a guy who’d learned to talk in a bowling alley (“Wake up, yuh good-for-nothin’ bum!”), but no matter how he spoke, and no matter what he was speaking about, no matter whether he was self-pitying or self-deprecating, lyrical or profane, Exley was brilliant, and the proof of his brilliance was this book. He had made it, even though he was a loser, or maybe because he was a loser, or maybe the book itself was proof that he wasn’t a loser after all.
Reading the book had done strange things to me, obviously: I read it in one eight-hour sitting, and after I was done I felt much better, much less alone than I had when I started it. Although I felt more insane, too, more unhinged in a manic, jazzed up way. This is the book’s strange power: it makes you feel the terror Exley must have felt in the asylums, and it also makes you feel the hope Exley must have felt after being released from the asylums, the exhilaration he must have felt when this document of his insanity was finished and published, the fear he also must have felt in knowing that these highs were only temporary, the lows always right around the corner.
Anyway, just after I finished reading the book, I received a phone call from a friend, and in a rush, I told her about the book, what it was about, how I’d seen myself in it, how it had made me feel. After I was done talking, she said, “God, it sounds terrible.”
“What does?” I asked. “The book or the way it made me feel?”
“All of it,” she said.
“No, you don’t understand,” I said, but then I stopped. Because I could hear the nutty whine in my voice, and it reminded me of the way Exley’s voice sounded when he’d explained to his wife-to-be about his obsession with Frank Gifford, and how she said he must despise Gifford for being famous the way Exley never would be. Exley responded thusly: “‘Despise him,’ I said. I’m certain my voice reflected my great incredulity. ‘But you don’t understand at all. Not at all! He may be the only fame I ever have!’” And then I realized that as much as I loved A Fan’s Notes, I did not want to be the guy who wrote it. I did not even want to be the guy who was so obsessed with it. Which is why, years later, I made up someone who is even more obsessed than I was, and then put him in a book so I could talk about what it’s like to love things—a man, a town, a country, a book—that can be difficult to love. Do I hope you’ll love my book as much as I loved Exley’s? Do I hope you’ll read, or reread, Exley’s book and love it, too, after all these years? Do I hope that if Exley were alive, he’d love my book as much as I loved his? Hope, of course, is the lie you tell yourself to keep from going insane. But yes, that is what I hope.
Questions for Discussion
1. Many novels feature what is known as an “unreliable narrator,” a narrator who may or may not be telling the reader the truth. To what degree do you believe Miller Le Ray to be unreliable? Is he unreliable just because kids with active imaginations are always unreliable, or are there other, more complicated, reasons behind his unreliability?
2. Does Miller seem like any nine-year-old boy you know? If so, or if not, is that a problem? Do we want children in books to be like children in life?
3. What does this book say about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and our reasons as a country and as individuals for fighting there?
4. What does this novel say about the power of a book like A Fan’s Notes, and the power of books in general? Would you want to be like Miller’s father—to feel so strongly about a book that you pattern your life after it? Is that kind of reaction a testimony to the weakness of the man or the power of the book? Is there some sort of ideal effect a book can have on us?
5. Talk about Miller’s mother. Would you make the same decisions she makes? Why does she make them? Do you blame her? Does Miller? Does Dr. Pahnee?
6. Speaking of Dr. Pahnee, discuss his transformation over the course of the novel. Does he become a better person/character? A more interesting one? Is there a difference? And do you consider him reliable or unreliable as a narrator? Why?
7. The relationship between Dr. Pahnee and Miller looks, superficially, like a classic teacher and student or father and son literary relationship, except that both these characters lie to each other and use each other. Does that mean they don’t really care about each other? How would you describe their relationship?
8. How do you interpret the end of Exley? What is it Miller is made to see?
9. Watertown, New York: Miller’s mother hates it; Miller and his father love it. How do you feel about it after reading this book? How do you think the author feels about it? Why do the characters who love it, love it? Are there places that, because they’re difficult to love, make you love them even more?
10. A Fan’s Notes is clearly important to this book, to its characters, and to its author. Does reading Exley make you want to read that book? Does Exley make Frederick Exley seem like a likable character/person/writer? And how would you define likable?
JON HUGHES/PHOTOPRESSE
Brock Clarke is the author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, which was a national bestseller and has appeared in a dozen foreign editions, and three other books. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.
