Memories of the Ford Administration
by John Updike
(Click here)
Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449912116
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Memories of the Ford Administration
Book Review: Good, not Great
Summary: 4 Stars
Updike tries to incorporate his decades long research of James Buchanon into a storyline that has a professor recalling his life during the mid-70s. The graphic depiction of the sex overtakes the book in ways that are unsettling, but the emptiness of the protagonist's life at the end is undeniable. It would have been better if Updike has just written a history of Buchanon that echoed the "New Journalism," but then he would have been entering Tom Wolfe territory and that would have been a "no-no."
Still, Updike's middling efforts on a book like this is worth the time to sink in the classic prose and realize that this world is fallen and passing away.
Summary of Memories of the Ford Administration
When junior college professor Alfred Clayton is asked to record his impressions of the Ford Administration, he recalls a turbulent piece of personal history as well. In a decade of sexual liberation, Clayton was facing a doomed marriage and the passionate beginnings of a futile affair with an unattainable Perfect Wife. But one memory begets another: Clayton's unfinished book on James Buchanan. In John Updike's fifteenth novel, he masterfully alternates between two men, two lives, two American centuries -- one Victorian, the other modern -- shining an irreverent, witty, and sometimes caustic light on the contrasting views of social fictions and sexual politics.General Books
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