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Summary
Summary
"Stunning...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 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 the 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.... A MAIN SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK From the Paperback edition.
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Irony, whimsy, supple prose, pungent imagery, penetrating social observation and a focus on his protagonist's libido are the familiar elements Updike brings to his 39th book (after Rabbit at Rest and Odd Jobs). But there is more: a biography/historical novel interpolated into the main story makes this an uneven, hybrid work. Ostensibly preparing a paper on the Ford administration, narrator Alfred Clayton, a professor at a New Hampshire junior college, finds his impressions of the period inextricable from the events of his own life at the time. Epitomizing the sexual liberation of that pre-AIDS era, he had begun an affair with a colleague's spouse, Genevieve Mueller, whom he dubs the Perfect Wife, in contrast to his own mate--messy, scatty Norma, the Queen of Disorder. His halfhearted attempts to divorce the one and marry the other are as inconclusive and bumbling as was (by implication) President Ford's lackluster half-term. Meanwhile, Alf is writing a biography (never finished) of James Buchanan, whose administration immediately predated the Civil War. Realizing that his recollections of his own experiences in the 1970s are as unreliable as were contemporary accounts of Buchanan's life and times, Alf concludes that it is impossible to arrive at the truth of any event. Updike's attempt to weld his two stories together is not always successful. Alf's sexual exploits are, by design, conveyed with more energy than Buchanan's aborted romance, and the details of Cabinet meetings attending the crisis at Fort Sumter retard the narrative's pace. Yet Updike's skill as a raconteur overcomes his novel's hobbled structure; in the end, his account is social history of a high order. BOMC alternate. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
His dreadful play of some years back, Buchanan Dying, must have left Updike with a raft of research material that he seems now to have taken and thrust into the fictional hands of a New Hampshire girls'-college historian, Alf Clayton, who's writing a sympathetic book about Buchanan, the president that had the misfortune to usher in the Civil War. Clayton also is writing a personal recollection of his chaotic sexual and family situation during the Gerald Ford administration--this makes up the narration here--and thus Updike can move freely inside two ideas: that the past is no more knowable than the confusing present, and that things--even if they do it at wrenching cost--``bump on,'' work out. Clayton has left his wife and family of three to live alone yet sleep with Genevieve. Genevieve's ``The Perfect Wife'' of a creepy deconstructionist--who finally sabotages the affair with a bit of deconstruction of his own devising. Alf sees sex, during the 70's, mostly as pathos, determined taboo-breaking that yields little more than manners; this is contrasted with the historical judgment of Buchanan, whose good instincts have been forgotten in favor of his ill-stars (``the erratic half-steps whereby a people effects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance seek amid agitation and the long stasis of contending equal interests the path of least general harm''). It's a novel about failure--and that paradoxical spinoff of failure, optimism. The Buchanan stuff, though, is gluey, boring; and Alf's Gongoristic high-style, stuffed with tropes and excruciated vocabulary, is rarely more palatable. It's the sex, as so often with Updike, that you come to the table for and is the most filling thing here--the grace notes of man/woman perceptiveness for which Updike is rightly renowned. The idea of macro- and micro-history clearly is something Updike wanted to chew over (as he did the ramifications of computers in Roger's Version), but it's the grounded experience of wanting and losing that grows the grass.
Booklist Review
/*STARRED REVIEW*/ In 1974 Updike wrote a full-length play, Buchanan Dying, about the fifteenth president of the U.S., that, critically speaking, took off rather like a lead balloon. Our protagonist here is Alfred Clayton, history teacher at a New England junior college, who is answering a call put forth by a regional historical society to submit written impressions and recollections of the brief presidency of Gerald Ford. Alfred does so, and in the process of losing himself back into those days that represented the full-flowering of the sexual revolution, before the advent of AIDS put a damper on such activity and mind-set, he also loses himself back further, into the days of James Buchanan's young manhood, the subject of a book Alfred was writing during the course of the Ford Administration. This novel, then, alternates between Alfred's submitted recollections of 1974-77 and chapters of his book on Buchanan. What at first seems an odd juxtaposition of time and purpose, though both elements of the narrative are exquisitely written and thus superbly enjoyable on that level from the outset (Updike as stylist seems to only improve with age), soon becomes a delicious parallel drawn between two avant le d{{‚}}eluge periods in U.S. history: one when "bodily fluids had no deadly viral dimension" and, earlier, one during which the burgeoning storm between North and South could still be settled by compromise. A luxurious novel, to be luxuriated over. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1992)0679416811Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
A simple request from an organization of historians for impressions of the Ford administration elicits these ``memories'' as reponse. Professor Alfred Clayton remembers what the Ford years meant for him: domestic disruption in the wake of his leaving his wife, the Queen of Disorder, for his idealized mistress, the Perfect Wife; ubiquitous sexual license; and the eventual abandonment of his attempt to write a sympathetic biography of President James Buchanan. But the subject of this virtuoso performance is not so much life during the Ford years as it is human memory and how lives, both our own and those of the historical dead, are remembered. Updike writes with droll wit and sly observation, serving up a meditation on history hidden in an erotic comedy. This should stand in the Updike oeuvre where Pale Fire does in that of Nabokov.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.