Exley's protagonist in Pages from a Cold Island is, once again, the fictional/factual Fred Exley. And, as before, he peoples his narrative with a cast of characters — the famous, the infamous, the eccentric, and the downright ordinary. Jonathan Yardley says: "Readers who aren't interested in the workings of [Exley's] mind probably won't be interested in his books . . . but what strikes me as singularly impressive is that he makes the reader interested. The true subject of Pages from a Cold Island is not Edmund Wilson or Gloria Steinem or Norman Mailer, but Frederick Exley, and he makes Exley matter."

Exley's interactions with friends from a favorite watering hole on Singer Island and with acquaintances at the Iowa Writers Workshop frame three pivotal dialogues in this novel. These surreal dialogues occur between the narrator and Gloria Steinem, and between the narrator and Edmund Wilson's former servant and Wilson's...