I remember nothing

Possibly reading Memories of the Ford Administration instead of other, better novels by John Updike first was the original sin. The dense, haphazard narrative held me up for long months during which I couldn't get myself to reach the closing paragraphs. There was so little I could connect with in the book and even less in terms of a writer's craft that commands attention or respect that I couldn't for the life of me finish it.

Yet again, as in so many other American novels, the protagonist is a second-rate academic who is plagued by a host of insecurities, oddities and personal tragedies. The novel has a form of a competition entry that he submits to a contest organized by a historical association for memories of the Ford presidency. A historian himself, he pieces together a chronicle of his own trials and tribulations during these years, when he shuttled between his wife, mistress and occasional flings for sexual satisfaction, interspersed with fragments of his publication on James Buchanan, a 19th century American president.

For the most part, it's neither comic nor compellingly tragic and switching between historical periods serves no clear purpose. Alf's reflections and adventures tend to be shallow, uninpisring or plainly dull. Even though the parallel story of James Buchanan is decently told, with convincingly recreated language and mores, it mostly distracts and chops the main narrative. For far too long I had a painful feeling the author was floating freely, with no larger concept to underpin the sluggish action. Indeed, exposing the promiscuity and permissiveness of the period in repeated sex scenes is not enough to make a novel, not even while pitted against stifling prudishness of the mid-1800. It seems the idea of basing a book on some vague interplay between academic fascinations of a historian and his troubled private life fell short of delivering viable substance.

It did get better towards the end of the book when the author started picking up the pieces, giving it a tint of a deeper family drama. It was perhaps this larger perspective, distance and making sense of things that I missed for most of the story, lost among pages and pages of irrelevancy.

chop suey = an American dish of Chinese origin, made of pieces or meat, beans and rice,
a masseuse = a woman who gives massages
a masseur = a man who gives massages

In America, "optimism isn't a philosophical position; it's an animal necessity, like defecation".