Updike's fifteenth novel is a comic mixture of history and fiction. The title is a joke because the narrator cannot remember anything about the presidency of Gerald Ford. He is supposed to write about it for an Association of American Historians, but his report instead is a mixture of personal history and a biography of James Buchanan.
The narrator is a professor of history at Wayward Junior College in New Hampshire, and his midlife crisis of separation from his wife is played out against Nixon's resignation and Ford's interregnum. The contemporary political history, however, goes almost entirely unobserved. The narrator is completely distracted by his personal dilemma, and his professional report, designed by Updike to be the text of the novel, reads like an academic parody.
The marital crisis preoccupying the narrator is a.....
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