Everyone remembers what they were doing when John Kennedy was killed, but no one even asks what you were doing when Gerald Ford was President. The wonderfully comic, deviously historical premise of John Updike’s new novel is that someone asks. The someone is the plausible-sounding Northern New England Association of American Historians, and the person asked is one Alfred L. Clayton, a randy spiritual relative of J. Alfred Prufrock, and one of Updike’s basic, repeatable (and repeated) heroes: faithless, clever, well-intentioned, willing to apologise if only he can figure out what he’s done wrong.

LRB 11 March 1993 | PDF Download