Clayton's memories are not restricted to politics, but instead intermingle his own Buchanan project, his failed marriage, and his infidelities and near infidelities. Clayton explains, "I had been trying in my spare time and vacations to write some kind of biographical--historical/psychological, lyrical/elegiacal, the sort of thing Jonathan Spence does with the Chinese--opus on James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States."¹

Much of the material Updike gathered for Buchanan Dying found its home in this novel, and Updike could give Buchanan's story the novelistic touches he tried to give it before. For example, Updike dramatizes Anne's illness and subsequent death in a manner he could never achieve in the play:

This pummelling in her head is spreading through her frame, a terrible pulsing, a sick fire vibrating in her veins. Her legs feel hot, and keep moving restlessly on their own, while the room's growing cold assaults her face and sends her hands kittering back under the covers. Where are the servants? She can no longer hear the running brook of conversation from far downstairs....She must be her own servant. Twenty-five drops: tha tmuch more Dr. Chapman had allowed. Triumphantly, like a traveller arriving at the end of her journey, Ann worries off the cork. But she is unable, on the high bedside stand, to find the doctor's glass dropper, though the teaspoon is there, glinting, long in its handle, like the whip in her dream. With trembling, shivering hands she pours a small amount into the spoon's shallow bowl. She tries to remember how full the spoon was at her first dose, and rather than administer too little she pours the laudanum, which has the viscidity of pear juice, until its glinting mound of liquid cohesion finds its limit at the spoon's edge.²

Bibliography of reviews of Memories of Ford Administration (1992)