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.