 Last Notes from Home is the long-awaited and triumphant third volume of Frederick Exley's trilogy, which began with A Fan's Notes. Exuberant, witty, perceptive, paranoid, outrageous - half fantasy, half fact - Last Notes from Home is ostensibly the story of Exley's journey to Hawaii from upstate New York to visit his brother, "the Brigadier" an Army officer who is dying of cancer. Exley's journey not only involves his brother's death and all of the love and guilt that entails, but the Brigadier's past life of covert activities, which troubles the narrator. Last Notes from Home also ranges irrepressibly over the obsessions of a lifetime. The narrator, sometimes cajoling and inveigling the reader - and sometimes writing a long letter to his sexually attractive shrink or even ranting about life to Marshal Dillon on the TV set - reveals the always fascinating convolutions of his own life, a confession that is at times hilarious, at times sad, and finally joyful. No one who reads this book will ever forget O'Twoomey, the maniacal Irishman who for a period takes over Exley's existence (making him a prisoner of his own characters), or Robin Glenn, the most beautiful, lying stewardess ever to inhabit the pages of a book and whom Exley, in his newfound paradiso, finally marries. Last Notes from Home is really a book about love - or rather the compulsive search for it - told by a narrator whose macho demeanor can't even begin to cover up the overwhelming rage and compassion that rule his heart.
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