Memories of the Ford Administration - A Novel

Zusatztext “Quintessential Updike . . . [a] comic and melancholy reflection on politics and passion.”— The New York Times Book Review   “Updike has the ability to evoke the micro-epochs that fascinate us. He can bring to life what seem to those of us who have lived them the vital differences between the decades of our lives.”— Chicago Tribune   “Compelling . . . Alf’s life and times are light and funny; Buchanan’s are dark and serious. Alternating between the two! Mr. Updike entertains and instructs . . . in gorgeous prose.”— The Wall Street Journal Informationen zum Autor John Updike Klappentext When historian Alfred "Alf" Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974-77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past. Alf's highly idiosyncratic contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857-61). The alternating texts mirror each other and tell a story in counterpoint, a frequently hilarious comedy of manners contrasting the erotic etiquette and social dictions of antebellum Washington with those of late-twentieth-century southern New Hampshire. Alf's style is Nabokovian. His obsessions are vintage Updike.chapter 1 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 Triquarterly Journal, Retrospect I remember I was sitting among my abandoned children watching television when Nixon resigned. My wife was out on a date, and had asked me to babysit. We had been separated since June. This was, of course, August. Nixon, with his bulgy face and his menacing, slipped-­cog manner, seemed about to cry. The children and I had never seen a President resign before; nobody in the history of the United States had ever seen that. Our impressions—well, who can tell what the impressions of children are? Andrew was fifteen, Buzzy just thirteen, Daphne a plump and vulnerable eleven. For them, who had been historically conscious ten years at the most, this resignation was not so epochal, perhaps. The late Sixties and early Seventies had produced so much in the way of bizarre headlines and queer television that they were probably less struck than I was. Spiro Agnew had himself resigned not many months before; Gerald Ford was thus our only non-­elected President, unless you count Joe Tumulty in the wake of Wilson’s stroke or James G. Blaine during the summer when poor Garfield was being slowly slain by the medical science of 1881, while Chester Arthur (thought to be corrupt, though he was an excellent fisherman and could recite yards of Robert Burns with a perfect Scots accent) hid in New York City from the exalted office he would finally accede to. If my children were like me, they were relieved to have a national scandal distract us from the scandal that sat like a clammy great frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss, in the bosom of our family: my defection, my absence from the daily routine after dominating all the years of their brief lives with my presence, my coming and going, my rising and setting, my comforting and disciplining; my driv­ing them to school and summer camp, to the beach and the mountains, to Maine and Massachusetts; my spelling of their mother in her dishevelled duties from breakfast to bedtime, from diaper-­changing to, lately, sitting nervously in the passenger’s seat while Andrew enjoyed his newly acquired driver’s permit. I was the lonely only child of an elderly Republican couple, and fatherhood ha...

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.08.1996
• EAN: 9780449912119
• ISBN: 978-0-449-91211-9
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 208 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Random House Publishing Group
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature