Exley

An undisputed prodigy, 9-year-old seventh-grader Miller insists that his father is in a VA hospital in Watertown, New York, with injuries suffered from fighting in Iraq. Neither his therapist nor his mother believes him. Narrator Michael Sullivan gets Miller's child-genius attitude just right. We are sad for the boy who is trying to make sense of his father's abandonment of his family. Sullivan doesn't sentimentalize, allowing Miller his own voice--sometimes nasty, often coolly superior. As Miller's pompous, self-satisfied therapist, Chris Sorenson is annoying and spot-on. He's completely credible as the doctor lustfully fantasizes about Miller's mother. Miller's father's favorite book is Frederick Exley's A FAN'S NOTES, and Miller believes that his father will recover if only he can find Exley. Worthwhile listening. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

July 26, 2010
Clarke follows up his acclaimed An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England with a less gripping exploration of truth and fiction, set in Watertown, N.Y., during the Iraq war. Miller, a precocious nine-year-old eighth grader, is convinced that when his parents split up, his father joined the army, was shipped to Iraq, and is now recovering from combat injuries in a VA hospital. The father-son dynamic has roots in, strangely enough, Frederick Exley's cult book, A Fan's Notes, which Miller's father is obsessed with, leading Miller to fantasize that, if he can locate Exley, his father will be cured. Miller's story is augmented by the notes of his therapist, whose professionalism is first compromised by his attraction to Miller's mother and soon by his amazingly unethical (and sometimes morbidly funny) antics—breaking into Miller's house, playing along to a perverse degree with Miller's interest in locating Exley—that eventually obliterate the already tenuous line between reality and imagination. Clarke's a deft satirist, but the narrative's structural intricacies are more confounding than anything, resulting in a work that's fitfully engaging but slow, wonderfully mysterious but increasingly confusing.