For all we know, “Memories of the Ford Administration” was spliced together entirely out of recyclables: Alf’s half of the story is classic pre-AIDS Updike. “Gerald Ford, in his two years and five months of Presidency,” writes Alf, “presided over a multitude… of one-night stands”-and Alf gets his share. It’s part of the fun that Alf’s remembered ’70s are so Updikean; but the writing here is up to the ’90s standard set by “Rabbit at Rest.” What keeps us off balance, and the novel in balance, is Alf’s compulsion to interrupt his story with Buchanan’s. Clearly the 15th president, dithering while the Union dissolves, is his double: “I wondered if that was my bond with Buchanan, a helpless standing by, while vitality performed its wanton deeds.”

Good thinking. They also share a smallness of spirit–Buchanan “is said to have had the neatest handwriting of any President”–a tendency to waffle in a crisis, and a quirky likability. Old Buck’s squirmings over whether or not to defend Fort Sumter echo in Alf’s evasions when his mistress accuses him of an affair with yet another woman. “Why wouldn’t this incident go away, sink into history? … I was having chronic trouble reminding myself of the seriousness of this conversation.” Finally, there’s Alf’s sexual squeamishness: he keeps recalling the feel of “an icy bit of slime” when a naked lover gave him a postcoital back rub. Small wonder he loves our only bachelor president.

Buchanan, Updike’s fellow Pennsylvanian, was laggard in love; his frustrated fiancee died suddenly after breaking their engagement. No one knows if she really overdosed on laudanum, but Alf works the theory up into a De Quinceyish set piece: “Goodness and the lucid perception of goodness fill Ann like a magic liquid poured into a woman-shaped flask. . .” But just as we suspend disbelief, Alf breaks the mood by analyzing his method: “The present tense forced itself upon me as a way of drawing closer to Ann-the anti-historical tense of perpetual motion, of resurrection.” “Memories of the Ford Administration” is Updike in his darkly playful mode: hinting at painful .personal truths, then artfully undercutting them. “Here is Buchanan,” he wrote in the 1974 play’s afterword, “I am rid of him, and this book … constitutes, I trust, my final volume of homage to my native state.” Then, as now, he was kidding himself.