| Memories of the Ford Administration Contributor(s): Updike, John (Author) |
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ISBN: 0449912116 ISBN-13: 9780449912119 Publisher: Random House Trade OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: August 1996 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Historical - General - Fiction | Humorous - General |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 96096665 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 8.2" W x 5.5" (0.75 lbs) 416 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857-61).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. |