Memories of the Ford Administration

This John Updike novel is old-fashioned and richly descriptive, each sentence chiseled with care. Having read virtually nothing of his work, I had expected to find spare, arid prose a la DeLillo or Roth. Instead this novel is baroque in its ornamentation as it switches between a junior college professor's imagined life of James Buchanan, 15th president, and the professor's own messy life during the Ford years.

Epilogue

It is not surprising that a newly widowed woman would be dour; it is surprising that this woman, a writer named Anne Roiphe, would think that a memoir of 214 pages of present-tense dourness is worth enduring. The ham-fisted wordplay doesn't help: "I remember the Ezra Pound poem: Faces on the subway like petals on a branch. But the faces are not like petals, they are more like bicycle pedals, worn, dark, shadowed, concealing their histories behind a veneer of dust and soot."

The Clown

Heinrich Boll's novel reminded me in places of Graham Greene: the concern for Catholicism, the sensitive protagonist, his isolation. As a portrait of postwar Germany it isn't pretty; as a portrait of the human soul (in conflict with itself, as Faulkner said) it is exquisitely sad.

Coming Apart

Charles Murray makes a game effort at the end of this devastating account of America's decline to postulate a way out, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. At bottom, the problem is a literal one of breeding: The upper classes, mostly college-educated and civilized, are reproducing among themselves in de facto segregated zip codes; meanwhile, the pathologies of the lower orders — crime, bastardy, joblessness — are only getting worse. And there is no end in sight. Or, perhaps more accurately for what Murray calls the "American project," there is indeed an end in sight.

The Fear Index

Robert Harris's historical fictions on Cicero and Pompeii commended to me this present-day gothic tale about hedge fund algorithms gone berserk. The novel takes place over 24 hours in Geneva, and such is the author's skill that I doubt most readers will take much longer than that to finish it.