A Fan's Notes Book

Reasons I should have liked this book:

»   It's meant to be open, soul-searching and literary while at the same time appealing to my gender - the coarse one, that is.

»   It's a somewhat fictionalized memoir by a die-hard NY Giants fan. Though they're not my team, it was written at the time I was first gaining sports consciousness, learning that a skinny kid could somehow connect to the world of uncles if he knew how many yards Jim Brown gained against the Rams.

»   It supposedly set the stage for Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, a book I really liked detailing lifestyles of the thirsty and laddish, supporting Arsenal football.

»   It won the 1968 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel and was a National Book Award finalist.

Reasons I didn't:

»   Its subtitle is A Fictional Memoir, but according to Wikipedia it follows the real events of Exley's troubled, booze-sodden life pretty much to a tee. Whether the narrator was 9% Exley or 99%, it didn't matter to me; I just didn't like him. He was a bully and a butthead, his opinion of himself suffered Weimar Republic levels of inflation, and the list of his excuses for bad behavior was as lame as it was long.

»   Exley was a man's man, which is OK in and of itself, but he was just so blatant in his hatred of women. He took great pleasure in hitting one for giving a dead-drunk friend of his a hard time. A good rule of thumb says that any guy you imagine using the "Quit bustin' my balls" line is not confronting a problem, he is the problem.

»   There wasn't nearly as much about what makes a sports fan tick as I was expecting. Hornby's book was far better at that. All would have been forgiven, of course, had the more general self-characterization won me over. While Exley did do a decent job of identifying some of his many flaws, he was often less than sincere owning up to them - an egoist through and through.

»   It disappoints me that this book has a cult following. Somebody even opened a bar named after him. To me, that would be like the Lance Armstrong Sports Nutrition Shoppe.

»   Exley's writing talent has been praised, often by Exley himself, but I found a fair amount of it clunky and overcooked. The adverbs were the worst offenders. (E.g., anguishingly solemn, an unbridledly dear price, admonitorily advising) To veraciously tell you the truth, it made me surpassingly peevish and dampeningly unsatisfied.

A token attempt to be fair:

»   Some of the writing wasn't bad. The best parts tended to confess things. This line describing his short-term, ill-fated teaching experience was one of his best: "Sadly, I lacked the intelligence to simplify, and with an utterly monolithic and formidable pedantry I thought nothing of demanding that my students feed me back my own quackery."

»   Exley's father was a locally famous athlete with a competitive streak that made me think that the defeated son came by his hang-ups honestly.

»   Alcoholism is a disease. Maybe the poor excuses, offensive behavior, and irresponsibility are just common symptoms, and a book that shows this clearly is just being true to type.

»   It's not necessary to like the narrator to like the book. For me, though, it often helps. While I can easily appreciate a memoir showing how to be, I also want to be open to one showing truthfully (and wartfully, if you can forgive my newly attained habit for bad adverbs) how certain people simply are.

But who ever said Goodreads ratings had to be fair?

2.5 stars rounded down ill-naturedly to 2