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PARTISAN REVIEW
modation away." Along the way, the novel also allows Updike to vent
his irritation with present-day students who "have no patience with their
ancestors and little interest in the erratic half-steps whereby a people ef–
fects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance [read:
Buchanan] might seek amid agitation and a long stasis of contending
equal interests the path of least general harm."
Within the memoir, chapters of Alrs abandoned biography are inter–
leaved with his frantic sexual shenanigans, and the historical sections, with
their mocking abundance of pedantic footnotes, provide Updike with a
bravura opportunity to scorn the dry-as-dust historians mired in the
comparing of subtly disparate secondary versions of the facts ... and
sinking deeper and deeper into an exfoliating quiddity that offers no
deliverance from itself, only a final vibrant indeterminacy, infinitely
detailed and yet ambiguous - as unsettled, these dead facts, as if alive.
When Alf Clayton acknowledges the hopeless mediocrity of his
Buchanan enterprise, he simply gives up.
Memories,
cleady, is a sort of omnium-gatherum of Updike crotchets
and devotions. But despite the characteristic eloquence he brings to his
reflections about American history and present-day mores, this novel fails
to engage us. By now Updike's anatomical scrutinies of sex have struck
the same crotches so often, Alrs promiscuity is as inviting as cold oat–
meal. And do we really need yet another heavy-handed satire of an aca–
demic cocktail party? Or pages filled with the titles of pop-song hits and
bestsellers from the time of Gerald Ford?
What finally becomes intolerable to the reader is the tedium of
Clayton's abandoned life of Buchanan, which occupies more than half
the pages of the novel. Only once, amidst the tiresome regurgitation of
facts and events, do AIrs efforts strike fire, as he recounts a poignant
meeting in 1855 between Buchanan, then Ambassador to Britain, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, then the American Consul in Liverpool. The in–
terplay of intelligence and anxiety between these two very different
American personalities, as they meditate about the fate of their country
and the forces that threaten its unity, is superbly rendered. As for the rest,
it's fatally boring. No wonder Alf couldn't finish his book.
The hero of Maureen Howard's
Natural History
is Bridgeport,
Connecticut, where she was born and bred in an Irish Catholic family. A
once- thriving manufacturing center on Long Island Sound, Bridgeport,
like many such industrial towns of New England, fell victim to blight
and decay after the Second Wodd War. In several of her novels and the
