Man on the Sidelines

A FAN'S NOTES by Frederick Exley. 385 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Long ago, on Sunday afternoons, before TV antennas took root on America's rooftops, before Y. A. Tittle or Bart Starr or Jimmy Brown could create their instant mythology for the eyes of millions, a man often communed with his family or made a pilgrimage to nature to find solace for his workaday existence. Sometimes he went to a saloon or a ballpark. But now, each autumn Sunday, he turns to the TV set, and enjoys the drunken exhilaration of victories by Chargers, or Giants, or Packers. It is there, says First-Novelist Frederick Exley, 38, that contemporary man can find fantasy heroes to act out his own ineluctable dreams.

A Fan's Notes is the somewhat autobiographical account of Exley's youthful attempts to participate in the American myth. He wants to be the superhero, cheered on by adoring crowds --if not on the football field, where his father had excelled, then as a famous writer. He sees himself conquering the citadel of New York, luxuriating in money and success. The woman of his dreams has breathtaking legs, a snub nose, a Vassar girl's sophistication and the idealistic innocence of Doris Day about to be seduced by none other than Freddy Exley of Watertown, N.Y.

Misspent Manhood. Alas, when the real Freddy Exley stands up, he proves to be singularly inept. Drunkenly, he stumbles from one football weekend to the next. The games with their supermen provide the pitiful framework for his misspent manhood. He destroys his fledgling career in publicity. He finds that his dream girl personified the materialistic, castrating American woman. His weaknesses lead him to three stays in sanatoriums. Finally, he becomes a contemporary Oblomov, spending his nights and days on couches and beds, living in the marathon shadow world of television's cultural prefabrication, and talking to his dog.

"It was true that I pestered the dog. Such was my loneliness that after a time I ascribed human characteristics to the mutt. I talked to him constantly ('Let me tell you about the ambiguity of Henry James, Christie'). I taught him to sit up manlike, his spine leaning against the back of the davenport; and with my arm thrown buddy-like over his shoulder, we sat and 'watched' the television together. I even made him a little blue sweatshirt, a replica of my own."

What Exley (the character) cannot come to terms with is his inability to own the streets paved with gold, his failure to capture the imagination of the crowd, his realization that he was never even meant to be a contender for the crown. He is, in effect, an ordinary man forced to stand on the sidelines and cheer bitterly. "I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny--unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd--to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan."

The book is filled with comic scenes, acute insights and memorable characters --among them a salesman named Mr. Blue, who will perform 50 push-ups at the drop of a hint. The narrative ramblings, like a drunk's broken-field running, occasionally lose the reader in a muddiness of form. But they are part of the mad scramble that eventually makes Exley the winner his protagonist was so desperate to be.

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