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The Spurious Freedom of the Ford Years
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20029 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
4,257 Words |
| Author
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Larry Woiwode
Larry Woiwode is the author of several novels, including the
recent Indian Affairs, and has a collection of essays The
Wheel at the Cistern, forthcoming. He lives in North Dakota. |
MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION
John Updike
New York: Knopf, 1992
384 pp., $23.00
In his sixtieth year, with his fifteenth novel, Memories of the Ford Administration, John Updike offers his faithful readership an omnibus volume that can be read as a summation and overview of his writing career. All of the themes and concerns of Updike's work, from Poorhouse Fair through Rabbit at Rest, are recapitulated in this timely novel with its title of imperial distance. Updike by now has his characters and materials so readily at hand [see the accompanying essay in the Currents in Modern Thought section, page 554] it's as if he's playing it fast and loose from a familiar deck, but you're never quite sure if he isn't dealing from the bottom.
Alfred Clayton, whose "memories" in a double sense the reader is observing--there is a postmodern cast to Memories--is "the lonely only child of an elderly Republican couple." He was named after Alf Landon, the Pennsylvania-born Kansas governor who ran against FDR in the year of Alfred Clayton's birth, 1936, four years shy of Updike's own. The memories of Clayton include, in another historicopolitical interleaving, swatches of a history of James Buchanan that Clayton has been working on for most of his academic career, as Updike at points in his career began novel based on the life of this peculiar president, Lincoln's predecessor, but instead wrote the stage play Buchanan Dying. And now Memories.
The raison d'etre of this novel that that the reader rides like a ferris wheel--in a swinging seat from the Buchanan era for one revolution, a bucket seat of the close past, the Ford administration, for the next, with breathtaking glimpses along the way of Updike's oeuvre below--is contained in a memo at its beginning:
From: Alfred L. Clayton, A.B. '58, Ph.D. '62
To: Northern New England Association of American
Historians, Putney, Vermont
Re: Requested Memories and Impressions of the Presidential
Administration of Gerald R. Ford (1974-77), for Written
Symposium on Same to Be Published in NNEAAH's
...
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