Exley

July 26, 2010
Clarke follows up his acclaimed An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England with a less gripping exploration of truth and fiction, set in Watertown, N.Y., during the Iraq war. Miller, a precocious nine-year-old eighth grader, is convinced that when his parents split up, his father joined the army, was shipped to Iraq, and is now recovering from combat injuries in a VA hospital. The father-son dynamic has roots in, strangely enough, Frederick Exley's cult book, A Fan's Notes, which Miller's father is obsessed with, leading Miller to fantasize that, if he can locate Exley, his father will be cured. Miller's story is augmented by the notes of his therapist, whose professionalism is first compromised by his attraction to Miller's mother and soon by his amazingly unethical (and sometimes morbidly funny) antics—breaking into Miller's house, playing along to a perverse degree with Miller's interest in locating Exley—that eventually obliterate the already tenuous line between reality and imagination. Clarke's a deft satirist, but the narrative's structural intricacies are more confounding than anything, resulting in a work that's fitfully engaging but slow, wonderfully mysterious but increasingly confusing.

August 1, 2010

Clarke (An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England) has based another novel on an extended literary allusion, this time Frederick Exley. The novel, set in Exley's Watertown, NY, concerns a precocious young reader, Miller, whose father has disappeared. Miller is convinced that his father has gone to serve in Iraq and is now a seriously wounded patient in the local VA hospital. Because Miller's father was fixated on A Fan's Notes, Exley's memoir of alcoholism and sports obsession, he thinks if he brings Exley to the hospital it will help his father recover. His search for Exley brings him in contact with some of Watertown's low-life characters. Miller's mother, a gorgeous lawyer, sends him to what is probably the worst child therapist in the history of literature--a man so unassertive that he changes his name and therapeutic technique at Miller's urging and eventually channels Frederick Exley in hopes of helping Miller's father. The plot takes some unlikely twists, owing mainly to Miller's naivete, and he can seem little more than an unreliable narrator epitomized. VERDICT This charming story, at times hilarious, offers a postmodern commentary on the Iraq war, literature, and memoir. For literary fiction and Exley fans. [Featured at the Librarians' Shout and Share program at BEA.--Ed.]--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2010

Another literary high-wire performance by a novelist who is establishing himself as a unique voice in contemporary fiction.

This novel shares significant qualities with its predecessor (An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England, 2007), which provided a critical breakthrough for Clarke. Both have protagonists who are good-hearted, well-intentioned and self-delusional, thus as unreliable as they are likable. And both have a metafictional, book-about-books quality. In this case, as the title suggests, the creative springboard is Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, a memoirist novel that itself confuses the real with the imagined. Here is what the reader knows for sure: Nine-year-old Miller lives in Watertown, N.Y., with his mother, a lawyer specializing in domestic-abuse cases among the military. His father, whom Miller loves and who left the family, is obsessed with Exley's novel, so much so that its setting brought him to Watertown. Miller is so precociously intelligent that he has leapfrogged to the eighth grade. He narrates most of the novel. He also sees a therapist to help him deal with the absence of his father and his inability to distinguish the actual from the imaginary (a coping mechanism). The therapist develops some identity issues of his own. Miller's father may have been a professor, an alcoholic, an adulterer, or all or none of them. Miller is convinced that his father enlisted to fight in the war in Iraq, and has returned from combat in critical condition to the local VA hospital. He also believes that if he can find Exley he will save his father's life. Yet Exley in real life is dead, according to a biography by Jonathan Yardley (the book critic who also emerges as a character here). "Sometimes you have to tell the truth about what you've done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven't done," says Miller, who is in for as many surprises as the reader.

A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2010
In his latest brain-teasing raid on literary history, following the much-acclaimed An Arsonists Guide to Writers Homes in New England (2007), Clarke riffs on a cult classic, A Fans Notes: A Fictional Memoir (1968), by Frederick Exley. For Tom, a lost soul living in Exleys hometown, Watertown, New York, this misfits ballad of fury and alienation is a sacred text. Toms precocious nine-year-old son, Miller, is caught between his floundering father and his lawyer mother, who works at Fort Drum. Then his father abruptly joins the army, goes to Iraq, and ends up in the VA hospital in a coma. Or does he? Miller is beyond unreliable as a narrator, and so is his dangerously crazy shrink, who not only lusts after Millers mom, but also encourages his young patients impossible search through Watertowns underworld for Exley, whom Miller believes can save his dad. If only this clever and tender novel didnt get stuck in a vortex of aberrations. There are hilarious moments; Miller is endearing; and Clarkes take on the cruel toll of the Iraq War is profound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)