DATE: Sunday, September 28, 1997            TAG: 9709180489

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER 

                                            LENGTH:   70 lines

A PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED BOOR

MISFIT

The Strange Life of Frederick Exley

JONATHAN YARDLEY

Random House. $23. 250 pp.

Frederick Exley was a one-book wonder.

His autobiographical 1968 novel, A Fan's Notes, won a cult following for its passionate and haunting depiction of a man who idolizes New York Giants halfback Frank Gifford and is engulfed by self-doubt. The novel - a National Book Award nominee and winner of two other prizes - is ``sure to be cited . . book critic Jonathan Yardley writes in Misfit, his new biography of Exley.

Exley's next two novels - which also revolved around Fred Exley - flopped.

But Exley was also a full-time lout. He hit both of his wives, turned his back on his daughters, boozed nonstop, mooched off his friends and phoned them at all hours to talk about him, him, him. Still, his buddies - Yardley included - clung to him; and his ex-wives gravitated back to him as friends.

``What a piece of work he was!'' Yardley writes. ``Contradiction was, or should have been, his middle name. He felt that the world owed him a living, yet money meant little to him. He sponged off everyone who entered his life, yet he could be unexpectedly and unaffectedly generous. His judgments of others could be merciless, yet his loyalty was ferocious. . . . He was a great big baby who never grew up, yet he knew better than anyone else knew his shortcomings and failures.''

Yardley - who has won a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism in The Post - ably sketches Exley's influences. A childhood in isolated and frigid Watertown, N.Y., where people face ``the world with a pugnacity born of survival against steep odds.'' A father who neglected him, yet whose shadow as an ex-high school jock Exley could not escape. A mother who doted on him, overlooking his flaws.

His college career at the University of Southern California pointed him toward literature. ``The world of books,'' Yardley writes, ``became a retreat into which Fred fled, a place where he achieved a presence and authority that the real world denied him.''

After his three novels, he turned to journalism, which also featured a heavy dose of Fred. ``He wrote well when he chose to, but no matter what his subject he always ended up writing about himself, with the result that several assignments never got into print.'' He died in 1992 of heart disease induced by alcoholism. He was 63 years old.

What is striking in The Misfit is just how ugly and boorish Exley could be. This is truly a portrait of an artist as a middle-aged creep. When his twin sister entered a bar where he was holding court, he ignored her. He hit his second wife when she was pregnant. When one daughter was born, he said, ``She doesn't look anything like me,'' and walked out of the hospital.

What is missing is Exley's supposedly finer side, which won over the literati and women. His friends often described his ``sweetness, integrity, goodness, gentleness. They talked about his utter lack of pretension, his ease with people of all stations and occupations.'' But it doesn't come through here; Exley is hardly redeemed.

Why care about Exley? In the book's prologue, when Yardley may be at his sharpest, he says Exley's downfall illustrates the problems plaguing 20th-century American writers: their overreliance on alcohol, their yearning for celebrity, their preoccupation with self. Yet, Yardley says, Exley triumphed: ``Fred believed in the written word and the transcendent importance of the book, and in the end he got what he wanted.''

And now a new triumph: Random House is publishing, simultaneous with Yardley's biography, a reissue of A Fan's Notes in its prestigious Modern Library series. If only Exley's nonliterary life had been half as successful. MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer.

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