Weaving the personal and the political during the tumultuous 1970s

The paradigm-shifting era from the 1960s to the tumult of the early 1970s is the backdrop for novelist Francine Prose's first memoir, “1974.” Her title's eponymous year included the aftermath of the Nixon presidency. resignationThe Kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the New York Times' revelations of illegal internal espionage by the CIA.

The protagonist of the book is not an individual, but a generation embodied by the author. His starting point and his final line is Prose's strange, almost romantic relationship with the “anti-Vietnam War whistleblower and free speech hero.” Antonio RusoWHO helped Daniel Ellsberg “released” the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the US government's deadly lies about the Vietnam War, intensifying the movement to end it.

Prose's path collided with Russo's two years after he and Ellsberg were indicted on espionage charges. Prose was a young writer and activist who had just escaped her marriage in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to seek “the kind of nomadic life that could be lived back then” in the modern garrets and twisted alleys of Boho San Francisco. “I wanted to feel like an outlaw,” she writes. “So did everyone she knew. “Bonnie and Clyde were our Romeo and Juliet.”

The night she met him, “Tony looked at me too long,” she writes. “By 1974, most men he knew had learned not to look at a woman that way. …Tony congratulated me on my book, [saying] “the kind of thing men had recently learned to say if they wanted to get laid.”

Throughout “1974,” The prose skillfully weaves together the political and personal elements of this defining moment. Many lesser writers have tried and failed. It has been tempting for the so-called experts of the 1960s to tantalize readers with sensational stories of naked freedom-loving hippies, and for history buffs to reduce to facts and figures the passionate insurgency that led to the nation, and Western world, to revolution. edge. Of the many books I have read (and written) on the subject (I lived parallel to Prose's life in the 1960s and 1970s), none have matched Prose's use of the personal to deepen the political and vice versa. She widens her lens on each intimate anecdote, narrowing it down to information-rich passages that might otherwise seem dryly didactic. You would have to read many, many books to deduce what the prose serves here in a few sentences: a revolution translated as roux.

“If the late '60s were about believing in the possibility of fundamental change,” he reflects, “the '70s were about the dawning realization that the changes we wanted weren't going to happen. …The ideals of the 60s were ordered and reconfigured for profit. The increase in power we gained from our victories: the end of the Vietnam War, the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. — “they were replaced by the more reliable dopamine hits of spending and acquisition.”

Brilliantly, Prose places her strange and disappointing personal relationship with Russo within the broader context of their generation's crushing political disappointments, first with the America their parents raised them to revere, thanks in large part to revelations like the Papers. from the Pentagon. “The America that was in Vietnam,” Prose quotes Russo, “was the opposite of the America he had learned about in school.” Then came our generation's sense of failure, realizing that “we were dreaming of a whole new future, as glorious and improbable as Oz.”

In “1974,“ Russo's character represents both sides of the youth revolution of that time. He is as crazy and corrupt as America, and he is as serious and callous as the children of America who were trying to overthrow him. Unfortunately, it takes twentysomethings and pre-feminists longer than it takes the reader to realize that Russo is too preoccupied to be relationship material. Satisfyingly, in 2024, Prose, the seasoned writer, uses this dissonance to the book's advantage, turning her youthful, reflective longing for Russo into a watch of the old days when a woman wanted a man to desire her, no matter the cost. , especially a famous man who had saved untold Vietnamese and American lives.

“Tony needed to reschedule. Could we meet the next night? He was too disappointed. That should have been a warning,” he writes as the book and the relationship near their end. Instead, he visits a friend for a tarot reading. “Many swords appeared. … Moira said, 'You can see as well as I can that something is going to end badly.' I wanted reassurance that the tarot warning wasn't about him, but I was afraid to ask. I knew it as well as she did.”

After many years of estrangement from Prose and a mental breakdown from which she finally realized she could not rescue him, Russo died of heart disease in 2008. “We lost track of each other and let ourselves forget,” Prose writes. . As she deserves to do, as we all deserve to do, in the end she forgives her younger self, driven by dreams. “I think of Tony when I hear people talk about the crises we face now and say nothing can be done. …Tony thought you had to do something. That's what we believed at the time. Even if… chances were that most of what you did would eventually be undone, you still had to try.”

In this, his first memoir, Prosa she succeeds where many before her failed, stoking – without demonizing or idealizing – the brave, creative and idealistic movement that almost overthrew capitalism. The era of prose profiles under the title “1974” produced crucial social advances, and caused collateral damage to those, like Russo, driven mad by the effort required. Fortunately for us, that period also produced the best book yet written by the tremendously prolific and astonishingly talented Francine Prose.

Meredith Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that is even older than she is.