Notes from Exley's Reviewers
| "Every list of desirable bachelors needs a cult figure and writer Frederick Exley certainly fits the bill. He's a much-loved, male chauvinist who happens to write semi-autobiographical books of tremendous feeling and monumental eloquence. If you want to check him out for yourself, read A Fan's Notes or Pages from a Cold Island - anything you could possibly want to know about him you can find therein. He lives on an island in Florida, and likes to flirt with his female students when he teaches creative writing at various colleges. He won't want to settle down with you in the suburbs, but he'll make you laugh, cry, and love him." - Laura Knickerbocker |
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| "Anecdotally, though, they're interesting enough - Exley could drink for free in a lot of places - and he has a loopy, patient way with plot: nothing out front, no pretense, or the pretense of no pretense, because he builds all the time, tying things together, dominoing his way to a climax. His real knacks are for character and for some of the best sentences I've seen in a while." - Malcolm Jones, St. Petersburg Times |
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| "It doesn't much matter whether the incidents in the books happened or not, because what Exley is attempting is far trickier and more important and more interesting than merely keeping some factual record straight. Every story - any story, not just these - is good, or not, ultimately, to the extent that it justifies itself in the course of being told." - Malcolm Jones, St. Petersburg Times |
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| "[Exley] matters, I think, because beneath the sad surface of a life seemingly given over to too much booze and too much random sex and too much aimlessness, there is a true writer, an artist unseduced by fad and fashion, pressing on to the fulfillment of his vision." - Jonathan Yardley, New Republic |
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| "If Exley is a great writer, it is not for his public self-torment but for what he reveals about success and failure in contemporary America." - Michael Adams, Yearbook 81 Supplement |
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