Memories of the Ford Administration (1992)

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.

Author: John Updike

Categories: Americas, World Literature, Current Events, Biographies & Memoirs, History, Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction