While Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes envisions a culture every bit as inhumane as we find elsewhere in contemporary fiction, his novel represents a significant turn. Exley's America may fail and brutalize him, but he comes to momentary recognitions of his own not insignificant failings. Simply, unlike his fellow protagonists, Exley in A Fan's Notes carries the burden of guilt; indeed, he at times equates remorse with the very conditions of humanity…. Exley cannot always sustain an awareness of his own complicity in the sufferings of this world and often is overwhelmed by his rage at a callously indifferent America. Nonetheless, the significance of Exley's fragmentary and tentative introspective recognitions probably leads beyond A Fan's Notes and suggests a bad faith pervasive in much recent fiction.

Exley begins bumptiously enough. He desired "nothing less than to impose [himself] deep into the mentality of [his] countrymen."… Watching New York...