Exley

by Brock Clarke

Overview

“The literary equivalent of a half-court shot . . . Extraordinary.”—NPR

For young Miller Le Ray, life has become a search. A search for his dad, who may or may not have joined the army and gone to Iraq. A search for a notorious (and, unfortunately, deceased) writer, Frederick Exley, author of the “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes, who may hold the key to bringing Miller’s father back. But most of all, his is a search for truth. As Miller says, “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.”

In Exley as in his previous bestselling novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke takes his reader into a world that is both familiar and disorienting, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining. Told by Miller and Dr. Pahnee, both unreliable narrators, it becomes an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616201142
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/01/2011
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Brock Clarke is an award-winning author of seven previous works of fiction, including the bestselling An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. He lives in Maine, and teaches at Bowdoin College.

Read an Excerpt

Exley

a novel

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By Brock Clarke

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Copyright © 2010 Brock Clarke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56512-608-4

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Chapter One

Anything Can Be a Beginning As Long As You Call It One

My name is Miller Le Ray. I am ten years old. I was nine years old when my dad went to Iraq, and I was still nine years old eight months later when I found out he was back from Iraq and in the VA hospital. The day I went to see him in the VA hospital was the day I started trying to find Exley. Exley was the guy who wrote my dad's favorite book, A Fan's Notes. Mother calls the Exley I eventually found a Man Who Just Said He Was Exley. But I just call him Exley. Because this is one of the things I learned on my own: you need to say things simply, especially when they're complicated.

So why don't I begin there: the day I went to see my dad in the VA hospital. Exley's book begins toward the end, but he calls it a beginning anyway. Because this is one of the things I learned from Exley: anything can be a beginning as long as you call it one.

A Beginning

I woke up on Sunday, the eleventh of November, 200-, knowing that my dad had come home from the war. I knew this without anyone having to tell me; I knew it in my bones, the way you always know the most important things. I jumped out of bed and ran into my parents' room. The bed was unmade and there was no one in it. The room was as empty as the bed. I checked the upstairs bathroom. The faucet was dripping, like always. Before my dad went away, Mother sometimes joked that he was the kind of guy who would join up and go to Iraq just so he wouldn't have to fix the faucet. After he left, she stopped making the joke. But anyway, the bathroom was also empty. I went back to his bedroom, in case my dad had snuck in there while I was in the other rooms looking for him. But it was empty, too. Then I heard a sound coming from downstairs. It was Mother, crying. Mother never cried. The only other time I had ever heard her cry was when my dad went to Iraq in the first place. This was, of course, how I knew my dad was home: I'd heard Mother crying without knowing I'd heard her crying. When we say we know something in our bones, we mean we don't know yet how we know what we know. This is what we mean by "bones."

So I ran downstairs and followed the sound of Mother's crying, which led me to the bathroom. The door was closed. I went to knock, then almost didn't. Because it was hard to have an intelligent conversation with Mother when she was in the bathroom. I knew, from experience, that if I knocked on the bathroom door, this is how the conversation would go.

"I'm in the bathroom," Mother would say.

"What are you doing in there?" I would ask.

"Miller, I am in the bathroom," Mother would say.

"I know," I would say. "But what are you doing in there?"

But this time was different. It was different because Mother had been crying and I wanted to know why, and my dad was back from the war and I wanted to know where he was. I knocked on the door, and Mother stopped crying immediately.

"I'm in the bathroom," she said.

"Why were you crying?" I asked. And then, before she could answer, I asked, "Where's my dad?" Which started her crying again.

I took a step back from the door and thought about what I knew. I absolutely knew my dad was back from Iraq. Except he wasn't in our house, which he would have been if he'd been able to be in our house. Mother was crying, which she'd never done, as far as I knew, except for that once. All of this was going on in Watertown, New York. Fort Drum is in Watertown. It's an army fort. I go to school with dozens of kids whose dads and mothers are based at Fort Drum before and after going to Iraq. I knew from them that when their parents left Iraq for Watertown, they went to one of three places. My dad wasn't in the house - my eyes told me that. My dad wasn't in the base morgue, either - my bones told me that, just as surely as they'd told me my dad was back from Iraq in the first place. That left only one place where he could be: the VA hospital.

I went upstairs, got dressed, brushed my teeth, walked back downstairs, got Exley's book from my dad's study, put it in my backpack, shouldered the backpack, then took a few steps toward the bathroom. The door to the bathroom was still closed, and I could hear Mother still crying behind it, quieter now, but steady, like an all-day rain. Please don't cry, I wanted to say to her. I'm going to go get my dad and bring him home and everything will be all right. So please don't cry. But I didn't think I could say anything like that and not feel ridiculous afterward. I thought of my dad, of what he might say to Mother under these kinds of circumstances. Probably something not exactly comforting, probably something beginning with the phrase "For Christ's sake." I didn't think I could, or should, say that, either. So instead of saying either of those two things, I said, "I'm going to ride my bike," although possibly not loud enough to be heard over her crying. In any case, Mother kept crying. And so I walked into the garage, where I kept my Huffy, climbed on, and pedaled to the VA hospital.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Exley by Brock Clarke Copyright © 2010 by Brock Clarke. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Clarke pulls off a nice trick here, playing postmodern games while delivering a cleverly plotted story complete with a surprise twist embedded in Miller's partial understanding of his parents' tension-riddled relationship.
—The Washington Post

Wendy Smith

"It's the flashes of insight into what it's like to fiercely love a-far-from-perfect father and his sad-sack hero despite their flaws that will move you." —San Francisco Chronicle
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Clarke has a distinctively winning style. He imagines characters so careful in their reasoning that they are deeply, maddeningly unreasonable but also tenderly hapless at the same time. Mr. Clarke is able to make their isolation both heart-rending and comically absurd." —New York Times
—The New York Times

"Remarkable . . . In the hands of a less talented writer, the novel's layers, twists and identity puzzles could strain the belief of even the most credulous reader; but Clarke's narrative assurance and unfailingly realistic characters allow him to pull off the literary equivalent of a half-court shot. This would have been a hard novel to write even adequately, but Clarke's performance here is extraordinary; it's far and away the best work of his career." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org
—NPR.org

"Clarke expertly evokes other authors who deal with children's quests in the face of tragedy and mental illness, from J.D. Salinger to Jonathan Safran Foer. In the end, however, the novel comes off as its own original foray into the land of floating realities, and explains why, though so many of us claim to want the truth, in the end we are almost always content to believe in a well-reasoned lie." —Time Out New York, 5-star review
—Time Out New York

"Frederick Exley's classic 1968 account of his epic alcoholism, A Fan's Notes, bears the oxymoronic subtitle "A Fictional Memoir." It is the space between those words, between real and fabricated memory, that Clarke examines . . . With humor as black as Exley's liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another—and those we tell ourselves." —Entertainment Weekly
—Entertainment Weekly

"In Exley, Brock Clarke's follow-up to the excellent An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, hidden identities and secret affairs bubble up when a young boy investigates why his father left the family. We laughed. We cried. We wanted to strangle the meddling therapist." —Daily Candy
—Daily Candy

"Oddly brilliant . . . The luminously engaging plot reveals the deceptions we cling to in order to survive . . . Clarke's breathtaking creativity gives unexpected power to his quirky, touching story." —Daily Beast
—Daily Beast

"Another literary high-wire performance by a novelist who is establishing himself as a unique voice in contemporary fiction . . . A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
—Kirkus Reviews

“Clarke has a distinctively winning style. He imagines characters so careful in their reasoning that they are deeply, maddeningly unreasonable but also tenderly hapless at the same time . . . both heart-rending and comically absurd.” —The New York Times

“Remarkable . . . Clarke’s narrative assurance and unfailingly realistic characters allow him to pull off the literary equivalent of a half-court shot . . . [His] performance here is extraordinary; it’s far and away the best work of his career.” —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

“With humor as black as Exley’s liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another—and those we tell ourselves.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Clarke pulls off a nice trick here, playing postmodern games while delivering a cleverly plotted story complete with a surprise twist.” —The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

"In Exley, Brock Clarke's follow-up to the excellent An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, hidden identities and secret affairs bubble up when a young boy investigates why his father left the family. We laughed. We cried. We wanted to strangle the meddling therapist." —Daily Candy

Daily Candy

"Oddly brilliant . . . The luminously engaging plot reveals the deceptions we cling to in order to survive . . . Clarke's breathtaking creativity gives unexpected power to his quirky, touching story." —Daily Beast

Daily Beast

"Remarkable . . . In the hands of a less talented writer, the novel's layers, twists and identity puzzles could strain the belief of even the most credulous reader; but Clarke's narrative assurance and unfailingly realistic characters allow him to pull off the literary equivalent of a half-court shot. This would have been a hard novel to write even adequately, but Clarke's performance here is extraordinary; it's far and away the best work of his career." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

NPR.org

"Clarke has a distinctively winning style. He imagines characters so careful in their reasoning that they are deeply, maddeningly unreasonable but also tenderly hapless at the same time. Mr. Clarke is able to make their isolation both heart-rending and comically absurd." —New York Times

The New York Times

"Frederick Exley's classic 1968 account of his epic alcoholism, A Fan's Notes, bears the oxymoronic subtitle "A Fictional Memoir." It is the space between those words, between real and fabricated memory, that Clarke examines . . . With humor as black as Exley's liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another—and those we tell ourselves." —Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly

"It's the flashes of insight into what it's like to fiercely love a-far-from-perfect father and his sad-sack hero despite their flaws that will move you." —San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

"Clarke expertly evokes other authors who deal with children's quests in the face of tragedy and mental illness, from J.D. Salinger to Jonathan Safran Foer. In the end, however, the novel comes off as its own original foray into the land of floating realities, and explains why, though so many of us claim to want the truth, in the end we are almost always content to believe in a well-reasoned lie." —Time Out New York, 5-star review

Time Out New York

"Clarke has a distinctively winning style. He imagines characters so careful in their reasoning that they are deeply, maddeningly unreasonable but also tenderly hapless at the same time. Mr. Clarke is able to make their isolation both heart-rending and comically absurd." --New York Times

The New York Times

"It's the flashes of insight into what it's like to fiercely love a-far-from-perfect father and his sad-sack hero despite their flaws that will move you." --San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

Another literary high-wire performance by a novelist who is establishing himself as a unique voice in contemporary fiction.

This novel shares significant qualities with its predecessor(An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England,2007), which provided a critical breakthrough for Clarke. Both have protagonists who are good-hearted, well-intentioned and self-delusional, thus as unreliable as they are likable. And both have a metafictional, book-about-books quality. In this case, as the title suggests, the creative springboard is Frederick Exley'sA Fan's Notes, a memoirist novel that itself confuses the real with the imagined. Here is what the reader knows for sure: Nine-year-old Miller lives in Watertown, N.Y., with his mother, a lawyer specializing in domestic-abuse cases among the military. His father, whom Miller loves and who left the family, is obsessed with Exley's novel, so much so that its setting brought him to Watertown. Miller is so precociously intelligent that he has leapfrogged to the eighth grade. He narrates most of the novel. He also sees a therapist to help him deal with the absence of his father and his inability to distinguish the actual from the imaginary (a coping mechanism). The therapist develops some identity issues of his own. Miller's father may have been a professor, an alcoholic, an adulterer, or all or none of them. Miller is convinced that his father enlisted to fight in the war in Iraq, and has returned from combat in critical condition to the local VA hospital. He also believes that if he can find Exley he will save his father's life. Yet Exley in real life is dead, according to a biography by Jonathan Yardley (the book critic who also emerges as a character here). "Sometimes you have to tell the truth about what you've done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven't done," says Miller, who is in for as many surprises as the reader.

A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.

Kirkus Reviews