During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories—and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York. What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women's liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
Prose’s memoir of course reflects her own experience, but like all memoirs, it also offers a snapshot in time, in this case a tumultuous period in U.S. history. And, as with all memoirs, we must ask ourselves: How much of this writer’s memory can we believe? ... Prose brings a sharp lens to her shortcomings ... She spares no one, including herself.
Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time ... She widens her lens on each intimate anecdote, narrows it on information-enriched passages that might otherwise feel dryly didactic. You’d have to read many, many books to deduce what Prose serves up here in just a few sentences: a revolution rendered as roux ... The era Prose profiles under the title 1974 produced crucial social advances, and did collateral damage to those, such as Russo, who were driven mad by the effort required. Fortunately for us, that period also yielded the best book yet by the wildly prolific, astonishingly talented Francine Prose.
Ms. Prose makes a fine Virgil through the period’s sometimes infernal landscape ... The author’s guilt over not doing more for Russo... is the book’s least persuasive element, for surely a writer of Ms. Prose’s talents should recognize that there is more than a bit of vanity in these salvific impulses.
