A fan's notes

Frederick Exley wrote this novel as the first installment of a trilogy that reads like autobiography but is openly fiction. Its narrator presents himself as a man who has never managed much, and the book follows his slide into a bleak stretch of American life, marked by drinking and a run of despairing episodes. Along the way his devotion to the New York Giants runs through the story as a steady thread.

What drives the book is the narrator's climb out of that low point. Hard-won insight comes out of his darkest moments, and the story treats that hard-earned understanding as the real payoff. Readers who enjoy frank, first-person accounts of failure and recovery, told with a sharp eye for the world's rougher edges, will find it rewarding.