Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Memories of the Ford Administration
Book Review: Buchanan and U
Summary: 5 Stars
The Updike persona is Alfred Clayton, a New Englander, schooled at Middlebury and Dartmouth. He is an historian. As the book opens he and his children are watching Nixon's resignation speech, marking the beginning of the Ford administration. He is babysitting for the children while his wife goes out with another man since the couple is separated.
Alf refers to his wife Norma as the Queen of Disorder. He calls his mistress Genevieve the Perfect Wife. She is married to an English professor, a deconstructionist. The college is named hilariously by Updike Wayward College.
When Alf left his family he took away his little library on James Buchanan, the subject of a book he had been trying to write for a decade. Buchanan's upbringing began in a log cabin in the middle of Pennsylvania. Buchanan's life and administration form a complement to the Ford administration. They are a sort of filigree.
Buchanan and his fiancee separated over a misunderstanding. Shortly afterwards the young woman, Ann Coleman, died. As a distraction from his grief, Buchanan ran for public office.
Genevieve told Alf that he had been lower than the cats in the household hierarchy. Alf describes himself as doing postgraduate work in adultery and child neglect. When Alf spends the night in his old house because his mother is visiting, he nearly has an asthma attack.
The president of Wayward has a high tech west coast style of governance. She decorates herself like a year around Christmas tree with bangles and hoops.
In the run-up to the Civil War Buchanan insisted upon the defense of federal forts. Genevieve's husband is offered a position at Yale and she is inclined to accompany him there. Alf returns to his family as the Ford administration ends and he and his children watch the inaugural ceremonies of Jimmy Carter. Amusingly there is a bibliography on Buchanan works.
Book Review: Outstanding Biography of James Buchanan, 15th POTUS
Summary: 5 Stars
I borrowed this from the library not knowing anything about the content, judging from the title that it was a retrospective of the accidental Ford Presidency. Much to my surprise, it had nothing to do with Ford, merely referring to the period in history when the book's narrator, Alfred "Alf" Clayton, wrote his Buchanan biography.
The book interweaves Alf's life from 1974 to 1976 with Alf's biography of James Buchanan, which he was writing during the same time.
The portions of the book dedicated to Alf's life are hilarious and typical Updike. These episodes in themselves were excellent reading. However, what makes the book great, is his treatment of Buchanan and the larger fabric of America during Buchanan's long life, and particularly during the decade preceding the Civil War.
Updike paints a sympathetic portroit of Buchanan, unlike most Presdential scholars, who consistently rate him among the worst of America's Presidents. I tend to agree with Updike, as "Old Buck" was running a country that was, at the time, completely ungovernable. Trying to keep the peace, Buchanan was scorned for his efforts by the North and the South. I don't think anyone adorning Mt. Rushmore could have avoided what ensued.
Updike recounts Buchanan's childhood in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, through his romance with Anne Coleman in Lancaster and his rise as a lawyer and politician, through his election as POTUS, and it's culmination in the collapse of the Union.
This was a great book and I recommend it highly.
Book Review: Genius on Display
Summary: 5 Stars
This book features Updike's astonishing talent with the felicitous phrase and the perfect observation. Here is one of hundreds from this beautifully written book: 'The coming day was yet only an unhealthy blush low in the eastward sky, a crack of sallow light beneath a great dome of darkness to which stars still clung, like specks of frozen dew, though the moon had fled.' But oddly, this genius seems to work against Updike in 'Memories.' This is because his immense talent allows him to jump from what he can render as high point to high point in the lives of Alf Clayton and John Buchanan, the protagonists of this novel's two interlocked story lines. Here, a comparison might be an acting class, where actors do only the most dramatic scenes from great plays.
Somehow, Updike's brilliance in 'Memories' has this same effect on me. In retrospect, this novel is a succession of perfect aesthetic moments. But the personalities of Alf and Buchanan? Certainly, poor Alf is caught in an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, Buchanan is a temporizer who ultimately fails to master chaos. But the book feels to me like highlights, not the full game, like snapshots instead of tapes.
Of course, I'm not complaining. Updike tells us in his title that these are memories. And, I know these characters, two muddled men, will stay with me.
In my opinion, a facet of Updike's genius is on full display here. It remains one exemplar for judging fiction, for all time.
Book Review: The greatest descriptions of male-female sex ever written
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was an adolescent, my book reading often amounted to little more than a search for the sex parts. This is a book which repays that habit a thousand fold. The parts about President Buchanan are also interesting, but they are humdrum besides Updike's incredibly accurate and moving descriptions of his adulterous sexual episodes. I think that sex has never been written about this way before or since, because they seem to recover, by attention to the tiniest details (the woman whose clear blue eyes became milky in response to penetration) the sense and smell of the actual event. If Proust had written about sexual intercourse, this is the way he would have written. In a lesser vein, the conceit for the book is humorous. Asked by his local historical association to recall memories of the Ford administration, the alleged narrator of this story recalls his adulteries. Not a belly laugh, but wry humor.Book Review: A dithering, ineffectual leader
Summary: 5 Stars
I cannot be objective about Updike. I consider him a genius and swallow his text whole.
But something that is missing from the other reviews is the parallel between the narrator and the primary subject of the book (not President Ford, but the 15th President, James Buchanan). The narrator portrays Buchanan sympathetically, but as an dithering, ineffectual leader. He draws no parallel between Buchanan and Ford (who was unfairly portrayed as a bumbler in his day). Rather, the narrator seems to be confessing his own ineffectuality in forming intimate relationships with his wife, lover and children, and his tendency to dither rather than commit to a monogamous relationship.