Updike at Rest : MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, <i> By John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 371 pp.)</i>

After “Rabbit at Rest” it was clear that, barring a ghost-story sequel, Harry Angstrom had made his last run, being dead. John Updike is not dead, nor is there any reason to think he is making a last run. Yet something about this latest novel wants it to be called “Updike at Rest.”

Only at the very end of “Memories of the Ford Administration” does the notion come suddenly into focus. It comes as a moving answer to a question that has nagged all the way through. This story of an indecisive college professor, an Updike archetype, goes over much of the author’s familiar territory. The professor, whose passions are snared by his qualms and vice versa, is trying simultaneously to leave his wife for another woman and to write the history of the indecisive and qualm-ridden James Buchanan, predecessor to Lincoln and the Civil War.

The story hikes up to the wood-smoke views, picks its way around the quandaries, marches in transcendental speculation, feet rummaging the ground and heart and gonads at a perpetual simmer. Not that it lacks freshness or wit, or the compassion that is so nosy as to seem perverse; or Updike’s willingness to risk his matured wine in the new bottles of each new decade.

Still, there is a sense of repeating (however pleasurably), despite fresh exploration and satire offered by his protagonist’s engagement on the currently fashionable battlefield of history-writing. Updike’s novels, in their agreeable doggy lope, with stops to sniff and water and move on, usually have a purpose and a direction. For the most part, “Memories” is bracing and pleasurable, but haven’t we been here before?

Yes. But the illumination that flashes upon the very last page is that we are not repeating, we are revisiting. “Memoirs” seems to declare itself a last tour of familiar rooms before closing the house. Conceivably, to return; but I think the message is: To move on. And suddenly, the rooms are not familiar.

Three entirely different things go on in the mournful and comic account of Alfred (Alf) Clayton, who teaches American history at utterly unprestigious Wayward College in southern New Hampshire. Entirely different and thoroughly intertwined.

One of them takes place now. For some misguided reason we never learn, a society of history professors has asked Alf to do a paper on his memories of the Administration of Gerald Ford, 15 years and a whole seeming era ago. The paper, a rambling confessional which the association is to edit--they must respect his long paragraphs, he cautions, in a Nabokovian aside--is the book.

Ford barely appears in it, except as the symbol of a time when Alf was relatively young, the country was prosperous, AIDS and political correctness had not shown up, the sexual revolution was over and won and fun, and it was taken for granted that professors and nubile students would converge. “Was not the guru’s power as giver of assignments and grades as legitimately a charm as the dewy youth of his pupil?” Alf asks in a delirium of incorrect nostalgia. “Is not clout, in short, what men have instead of beauty?”

There is a lot of converging. “Memoirs” has more sex in it than any of Updike’s previous books. It is his liturgical kind of sex, full of attentive and reverential detail. You don’t just snack; you say grace first. A suspicion dawns: Is Updike satirizing himself? The same thought occurs with Alf’s messy family life. He leaves Norma--”My queen, my palely freckled red-headed bride (who) still had her waist then, her lissome milky legs”--for Gen “in tennis whites with a breathtaking little black hem to her socklets.” (Two more quotes that recall Nabokov’s amiably specious narrators.) Trim and sexy and highly organized, Gen is the wife of a colleague and professional rival.

Nobody really leaves anybody, in fact, even though Alf has moved to a bare apartment and divorce proceedings are under way. Very languidly, though; they peter out like Australian rivers. There are two sets of children--Updike is unfailingly brilliant on the child wilderness that grows in adultery’s pleasure-garden--and common bills, habits and history. Reality, in short.

But back then--was it the era, or one’s age, or both?--the word was that reality could be changed. Apart from a new life with Gen, there was the book that was to launch Alf out of Wayward. It would be zingy, patterned, up-to-date. Of course it was necessary to find “a little patch not trod too hard by other footsteps where maybe you can grow a few sweet-peas.”

That was Buchanan: Obscure, hard to remember, ungraspable even when remembered. He was a kind man, a compromiser who urged sympathy for the South, won no allies there and lost the ones he had in the North. He insisted on maintaining the Union but lacked political legions to back him and, sad but no doubt relieved, gave way to Lincoln.

Alf’s struggles with his formless life and time are intercut with his stabs at portraying Buchanan’s hapless struggles with his. This gives Updike the opportunity to make a hilarious tangle of contemporary historiography. Alf is skeptical about post-structuralism’s scorn for history as “reality” and its treatment of it as a flexible text to serve contemporary concerns.

“If you deconstruct history you take away its reality, its guilt, and for me its guilt is the most important thing about it,” Alf complains. Still, that’s where a life-change lies, and soon he is juggling texts in fitful and sometimes embarrassed abandon.

He tells the story of Buchanan’s tragic courtship of Ann Coleman--who rejected him and immediately died--three or four different ways. Since Buchanan was our only bachelor President and was soft and hairless in appearance as well as style--one or two opponents attacked him as unmanly--Alf claims him for the gay movement. He deconstructs a Senate speech defending the South into a hidden love message to Buchanan’s best friend, a Southern senator.

Yet Updike never does only one thing at a time. Into his lively historical pastiche he inserts here and there stunning elements in the portrait of a decent, suffering and elusive figure. As an artist, Updike makes elusiveness a transforming moonlight. By this moonlight, the lines between Alf and Buchanan, and even Gerald Ford--decent and no doubt equally forgettable--shimmer and blur.

To return to the start, though; something is going on in this book that we sense without quite seeing. Even while Buchanan is filtered through a play of texts, there is a removed quality to Alf and his own life. All the exhilaration, pain and illusions happened long ago and are framed in the text of a paper written 15 years later. It is as if Updike were looking through a distancing glass at all those educated American passions and verities that he once brought so close.

At the end, Alf recalls skiing downhill one brilliant day to where his wife, mistress, their children and friends were waiting with a festive lunch. It has the quality of hallucination. Even as he recalls it, darkness takes over. “The more I think about the Ford Administration,” he ends his report to the historians, “the more it seems I remember nothing.” It is a sudden blackout for the teeming world that “Ford Administration” symbolized, and that Updike has expended so many years of art and substance giving life to.