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.
It’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.
This memoir, which despite its darts of insight and many flashes of good writing remains lukewarm and distant ... If this quarter-life crisis memoir were a stool, the third leg — after Russo’s story and Prose’s own — would be the author’s attempt at a group portrait of her generation, not the baby boomers writ large but a sophisticated subset of them. This material is the least successful.
Compelling ... Prose is a magician at pulling us in ... Prose is too good a writer to pretend Tony somehow changed her life and offered her a pathway toward some sort of transcendence.
