Memories of the Ford Administration
by John Updike
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Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449912116
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Memories of the Ford Administration
Book Review: Good News-Not Really About The Ford Administration At All!
Summary: 5 Stars
The brilliant John Updike delivers yet again. Deceptively packaged as a sort of historical evaluation of the Presidency of Gerald Ford, this book's protagonist actually tricks us all by giving Ford virtually no ink and ultimately encapsulates his feelings for the man by calling him little more than "the perfect President." You see, though he has been assigned the task of authoring a scholarly paper on Ford, the main character here, a writer and educator from New England, combines an autobiographical tale about his own life during the hectic, sex-filled mid-1970's, with his obsessive mission to make public his views on and expertise of the Presidency of James Buchanan. The writer becomes obsessed in an almost Hitchcockian fashion with Ann, the doomed fiancée of the lawyerly young Buchanan, a woman who meets a tragic death that sends the future fifteenth President of the United States into lifelong bachelorhood and---it is speculated-either undispelled virginity, or just possibly a homosexual relationship in the White House with an Alabama Senator. The Buchanan material, while most interesting of all in its early stages, quickly takes second billing to the tale of the writer's personal life during the 1970's, as he separates from his spouse, falls in lust with a local woman he terms "The Perfect Wife" and skirt-chases after the available females on his college campus and in his neighborhood and social circle. Updike does get surprisingly graphic, even erotic, in his descriptions of sex here, and in a few cases he shifts gears masterfully, making the same scene a thing of both Eros and physical comedy. Memories Of The Ford Administration is a dyed-in-the-wool masterpiece that surely gets its time periods, the first half of the nineteenth-century and the 1970's, down pat. It's a joy to read, a book that makes a reader think, and a tale to settle back and take delight in as it unfolds without effort. Without question a five-star book!
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.20th Century Books
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