Frederick Exley, the splenetic and prodigiously self-destructive narrator and protagonist of A FAN'S NOTES and PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND, is alive, if not exactly well. In this exhilarating, scalding new novel, Ex recounts his death watch for his older brother, his imprisonment by a nightmarish Irishman, and his sexual enthrallment to a beautiful flight attendant whose lies are even more inventive than his own. Searching compulsively for love and inevitably betraying it, lashing out at the country in which he is perpetually an alien, Exley remains one of the most riveting characters- and mesmerizing writers - in contemporary American fiction.
