''A Fan's Notes'' is a sardonic account of mental illness, alcoholism,
insulin shock therapy and
electroconvulsive therapy, and the black hole of sports fandom. Its central preoccupation with a failure to measure up to the
American dream has earned the novel comparisons to
Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby. One critic said it had Fitzgerald's later, confessional
The Crack-Up "hanging over the shoulder". Beginning with his childhood in
Watertown, New York, growing up under a sports-obsessed father and following his college years at the
USC, where he first came to know his hero
Frank Gifford, Exley recounts years of intermittent stints at psychiatric institutions, his failed marriage to a woman named Patience, successive unfulfilling jobs teaching English literature to high school students, and working for a
Manhattan public relations firm under contract to a weapons company, and, by way of
Gifford, his obsession with the
New York Giants. Exley's introspective "fictional memoir", a tragicomic indictment of 1950s American culture, examines in lucid prose themes of celebrity, masculinity, self-absorption, and addiction, morbidly charting his failures in life against the electrifying successes of his football hero and former classmate. The title comes from Exley's fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as in sports. After the book was published, Exley got to know its hero, Frank Gifford. In an interview with American Legends website, the late Mel Zerman, a Harper & Row executive, recalled an evening with the football star and the author: "Frank invited him to a party on one of those occasions when Fred was in New York. He insisted that I come. I believe Fred had probably sent the manuscript of ''A Fan's Notes'' to Gifford even before it was published. Fred was no dope when it came to selling books. It was clear that Frank liked him. Why shouldn't he? The book is very worshipful." ==Film adaptation==