Woe Is Me

By Paul Gray

PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND

by FREDERICK EXLEY 274 pages. Random House. $7.95.

If ever a successful novel seemed to be its own happy ending, it was Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968). In a captivating blend of fiction and autobiography, with remarkable humor and pitiless self-scrutiny, Exley, a high school football player turned writer and pressagent, told how his youthful fantasies of athletic and literary glory ripened into alcoholism, two ruined marriages, three stints in state mental institutions. For winters on end, he remembered, all that kept him lurching from Sunday to Sunday was an obsession with pro football and the exploits of New York Giant Halfback Frank Gifford, a classmate at the University of Southern California. To Exley, 45, Gifford's triumphant career provided weekly proof of his own status as an All-America flop.

Pixilated Idyl. Those who thought that success would spoil Exley's romance with failure underestimated his capacity for masochism. In Pages from a Cold Island, he comes up with a new hero to feel dwarfed beside. No mere football star, either. This time he has chosen the century's pre-eminent American critic and man of letters, Edmund Wilson. Once he creeps into Wilson's shadow, Exley happily sets off on another binge of literary self-deprecation.

Along the way, he swiftly tries to demolish or denigrate the success of A Fan's Notes, which got splendid reviews, sold respectably, and won some literary awards. For a while, Exley garnered fan notes of his own, as well as lecture invitations and a chance to hobnob with the likes of Norman Mailer and Saul

Bellow. His life settled into a long, pixilated idyl: winters of bohemian sloth on Singer Island, Fla., sleepy summers at his mother's house in upstate New York, side trips to Europe and Nassau, and an endless supply of booze and accommodating young women. Still, he insists, "my life-style of lugging my own soiled sweat shirts and skivvies to the laundromat and lunching on cheeseburgers and draft beer had altered not a whit."

Critic's Tribute. Edmund Wilson's death in June 1972 really gave Exley something to grieve about. He was seized by the desire "to take something of Wilson to carry with me" because Wilson had been everything he was not: dignified, dedicated, the last survivor of the lost, drunken literary generation. What was more, there was a tenuous connection between the two men. Wilson's final years had been spent restoring his ancestral stone house in Talcottville, not far from Exley's native Watertown, N.Y. Exley had never met Wilson, but then he had barely met Gifford. His mission was clear: sober up and pay tribute to the better man.

Naturally, Exley claims that he failed. His carefully prepared picnic with Wilson's secretary was "a disaster"; Wilson's oldest daughter did talk to him --about everything except her father. Exley, as usual, is too harsh on himself. The book's reconstruction of Wilson's last days--which the critic spent listening to the sound of a bulldozer chewing up his front yard for a highway project --is skillful journalism. It is as clear and direct as Exley's eulogy for Wilson: "He's done precisely what he'd set out to do as a young man--'to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought'--he'd lived to be 77, he'd died a lot less uncomfortably than he might have done."

Rueful hero worship is an odd, yet touching trait in a man of 45. Pages from a Cold Island goes in for a bit of heroine worship too, most successfully.

Exley tells how he schemed to meet Gloria Steinem because he wanted to learn how she had survived the 1960s with her poise and beliefs intact, "while I'd come out of the years badly whipped, cravenly, running to a quitter's obesity ..." Their interview, a comic pas de deux of cross-purposes, comes to an end when Steinem airily puts down an absent friend by saying that he "should have been a sports reporter for the Daily News. " Stunned, Exley cannot bear to tell her that "the dream of my life" was to be that very thing. It is as if Fay Wray had chased King Kong down the Empire State Building and into the nearest saloon.

Near the end of A Fan's Notes, Exley reached a bleary-eyed recognition of his "destiny -- to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others." But after two books, the question is: whom will he find next to measure down against?

A Fan's Notes did have a brief reference to Edmund Wilson. Pages from a Cold Island offers no such clue to the future. Henry Kissinger probably will not do any more. Warren Beatty? Queen Elizabeth II?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.