Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley

Frederick Exley's novel/memoir A Fan's Noteswas one of the seminal books of the '60s, as trenchant and funny on the theme of celebrity worship as any book ever written. By telling Exley's story in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley, book critic Jonathan Yardley hopes to excavate great truths about ''what it means to be a writer in America.'' Alas, all that's really uncovered is what it's like to be a grandiose, drunken freeloader and boor. In and out of psychiatric hospitals, Exley was a case study in the dark, self-destructive side of '60s romanticism. Yardley is an economical stylist who can't write a bad sentence. So it's all the more disappointing to find him maundering on about Exley's ''inherent otherness'' as if it were a badge of artistic heroism instead of a symptom of the disease that destroyed him. B+