Mixed4ColumnsIt’s an odd preoccupation for an author with a career-long interest in transformation. Prose’s novels are generally about the glitchy process of growing a conscience, though they’re also rollicking, flinty, teasing, fabulist yarns ... Perhaps the problem with 1974 is that it’s stuck in 1974. My sympathy warms to a diffident woman writer in her twenties, but now that woman is all grown up. Why does Prose cede her personal history to an ex-boyfriend? ... Maybe Prose intuited that she belonged in the driver’s seat, not sitting shotgun to a dried-up activist in the throes of a nervous breakdown.
