Last Notes from Home

Frederick Exley

ISBN 10: 0394405196 / ISBN 13: 9780394405193

Published by Random House, 1988

About this Item

Stated First Edition, 2nd printing. Clean & tight copy, unread, in FINE condition, of the final third of Exley's memoir trilogy. "Of his generation's metafictioneers, Fred Exley has created the richest and most American body of work. LAST NOTES FROM HOME tells tales about corruption, confession, and the often terrible beauty of the bonds of love."---Village Voice. "Exley can weave a number of seemingly unrelated incidents into a single, allusive narrative leading to an unexpected, usually prickly epiphany. His books seem like the loquacious meanderings of one of the more literary and entertainingly cynical, if often terrifyingly frank, guys one might meet in a neighborhood bar. They reveal themselves as structurally complex, thoroughly imagined, consummate works of art."---Boston Globe. It says it's a novel, but it breathes real life.

Seller Inventory # RUB874

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Last Notes from Home
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394405196
• ISBN 13: 9780394405193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

The narrator journeys to visit his Army-officer brother, who is dying of cancer, and learns to deal with that brother's covert activities and his own convoluted life

Reviews

Exley's friends and lovers seemingly put up with his alcoholism and pill-popping, his raunchy sexual bragging, his cheerful contempt for those closest to himbut readers of this autobiographical novel may lose patience with his bleary-eyed, disconnected soliloquy. This disappointing sequel to his popular Pages from a Cold Island is third in a trio of fictional memoirs begun with A Fan's Notes ; portions of it ran in Rolling Stone. The adventure starts with the author/protagonist/narrator's trip to Hawaii to visit his embittered brother Bill, "the Brigadier," dying of cancer at age 46. Soon we're awash in memories, fantasies and guiltthe time Exley shot his sister for squealing on him; his release from football anxieties through fellatio with Cass McIntyre, who later died of anorexia; his romance with an airline stewardess 20 years his junior. Permeating the story is the question of whether "the Brigadier," as an army spy in Vietnam, helped set up the My Lai massacre. The subtext of this macho, expansive monologue is the corruption of the American dream via Watergate, Vietnam, racism, greed. We've heard it all before. The patches of sharp, subversive writing might breathe if the book had been cut by half.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.