Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 16, 1993 TAG: 9305160241
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PETER CROW
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Throughout John Updike's prolific career as dean of contemporary American fiction, his subject has been constant - the average white American struggling to do a competent job at work, keep his family together and maintain some semblance of personal identity.
It has been a worthy topic ever since Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (1949), one which Updike keeps alive with tantalizing variation and a seemingly endless reservoir of metaphor.
His latest offering, "Memories of the Ford Administration," tests the limits of artistic juxtaposition. Alfred Clayton, history professor at a New Hampshire women's college, is asked by the Northern New England Association of American Historians to write memories and impressions of the Ford administration. What he provides are memories of his own familial problems while Gerald Ford was in office, interspersed with long digressions on James Buchanan, the subject of a book Alf never seems to be able to finish.
Little wonder.
During the Ford administration, Alf can't keep his hands off his colleagues' wives long enough to maintain a lucid train of scholarly thought. Interwoven with the wet memories of Alf's adventures between the sheets are staid recollections of Buchanan's botched courtship with Ann Coleman and sundry other trials, culminating with the president's floundering attempts to hold the union together despite South Carolina's impending secession.
Given the inspiration to consider together two American presidents, who but John Updike would have chosen James Buchanan and Gerald Ford? No attempt is made to reassess either. In fact, Alf's memories of the Ford administration relate to the permissive cultural ambience of the period rather than to politics or Ford himself.
As we watch the novelist continue to plumb the depths of WASP mediocrity, we are left to wonder when he will scrape bottom. Or if, perhaps, he already has - but is keeping us too amused to notice.
by CNB