Weaving the personal and the political during the tumultuous 1970s

The paradigm-changing era from the 1960s through the tumult of the early 1970s is the backdrop of novelist Francine Prose’s first memoir, “1974.” Her title’s namesake year included the aftermath of President Nixon’s resignation, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the New York Times’ revelations of illegal domestic spying by the CIA.

The book’s protagonist is not an individual but a generation, embodied by the author. Its starting point and through line is Prose’s bizarre, quasi-romantic relationship with “anti-Vietnam war whistleblower and free speech hero” Anthony Russo, who helped Daniel Ellsberg “liberate” the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the U.S. government’s lethal lies about the Vietnam War, thereby 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, having newly escaped her Cambridge, Mass., marriage for “the kind of nomadic life you could live back then” in the funky garrets and twisted alleyways of Boho San Francisco. “I wanted to feel like an outlaw,” she writes. “So did everyone I knew. Bonnie and Clyde were our Romeo and Juliet.”

On the night she met him, “Tony looked at me a beat too long,” she writes. “By 1974, most of the men I knew had learned better than to look at a woman that way. … Tony congratulated me on my book, [saying] the kind of thing that men had recently learned to say if they wanted to get laid.”

Throughout “1974,” Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time. Many lesser writers have tried this and failed. It has proved tempting for so-called 1960s experts to bait readers with sensational tales of whirling, free-loving naked hippies, and for history buffs to reduce to facts and figures the impassioned insurgency that brought the nation, and the Western world, to revolution’s brink. Of the many books I’ve read (and written) on the topic — I lived in parallel to Prose’s 1960s-1970s life — none has matched Prose’s use of the personal to deepen the political and vice versa. 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.

“If the late ’60s were about believing in the possibility of fundamental change,” she reflects, “the 1970s were about the dawning realization that the changes we’d wanted weren’t going to happen. … The ideals of the ’60s were sorted and reconfigured for profit. The surge of power we got from our victories — the end of the Vietnam War, the 1973 ruling of Roe vs. Wade — were replaced by the more reliable dopamine hits of spending and acquisition.”

Brilliantly, Prose situates her strange, disappointing personal relationship with Russo within the broader context of her generation’s crushing political disappointments, first with the America their parents raised them to revere, thanks in large part to exposés such as the Pentagon Papers. “The America that was in Vietnam,” Prose quotes Russo, “was the opposite of the America I’d learned about in school.” Then came our generation’s sinking sense of failure, realizing, “We were dreaming a whole new future, as glorious and improbable as Oz.”

In “1974,” Russo’s character stands in for both sides of the youth revolution of that era. He’s as crazy and as corrupt as America, and he’s as earnest and as ungrounded as America’s children who were trying to overthrow it. Painfully, it takes 20-something, pre-feminist Prose longer than it takes the reader to realize that Russo is too troubled to be relationship material. Satisfyingly, in 2024, Prose the seasoned writer uses this dissonance to the book’s advantage, turning her youthful, reflexive longing for Russo into a ticking timepiece of the bad old days when a woman wanted a man to want her, regardless of the cost, especially a notorious man who had saved incalculable Vietnamese and American lives.

“Tony needed to reschedule. Could we meet the following night? I was way too disappointed. That should have been a warning,” she writes as the book, and the relationship, turn toward their endings. Instead, she visits a friend for a tarot reading. “Lots of swords turned up. … Moira said, ‘You can see as well as I can that something is going to end badly.’ I wanted her to assure me that the tarot’s warning wasn’t about him, but I was afraid to ask. I knew as well as she did.”

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

In this, her first memoir, Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening — without demonizing or idealizing — the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down. 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.

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