Exley

Clarke (An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England) has based another novel on an extended literary allusion, this time Frederick Exley. The novel, set in Exley's Watertown, NY, concerns a precocious young reader, Miller, whose father has disappeared. Miller is convinced that his father has gone to serve in Iraq and is now a seriously wounded patient in the local VA hospital. Because Miller's father was fixated on A Fan's Notes, Exley's memoir of alcoholism and sports obsession, he thinks if he brings Exley to the hospital it will help his father recover. His search for Exley brings him in contact with some of Watertown's low-life characters. Miller's mother, a gorgeous lawyer, sends him to what is probably the worst child therapist in the history of literature—a man so unassertive that he changes his name and therapeutic technique at Miller's urging and eventually channels Frederick Exley in hopes of helping Miller's father. The plot takes some unlikely twists, owing mainly to Miller's naïveté, and he can seem little more than an unreliable narrator epitomized.