In 1974, then-20-something Francine Prose (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; The Vixen) spent time in a car, and eventually in bed, with Tony Russo (1936-2008), an antiwar hero famous for helping Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers. Why was Prose with Russo? 1974: A Personal History, her indelible and self-reproachingly frank first memoir, isn't a love story so much as a love letter to youthful idealism.
Prose met Russo in San Francisco, Calif., at her friends' poker game in late 1973; she had just published her first novel and was fleeing her crumbling East Coast marriage. Prose knew exactly who Russo was: ending the war in Vietnam was the galvanizing cause of her generation, his role in leaking the Pentagon Papers a defining act of the antiwar movement. She and Russo spent much time driving around a despoiled San Francisco--"The Summer of Love was over, and no one had swept up after the party"--and as he talked, Prose's image of herself as a rebel by association was burnished.
"Once, you could let your hair grow long and unkempt," Prose recollects, "but by 1974, you were supposed to clean up." Russo couldn't grasp, or maybe accept, the shift, and his resentment as the perceived lesser light to Ellsberg compounded his disillusionment. In 1974, an American tragedy (his) brushes up against an American dream: the memoir finds Prose already on her way to becoming a successful novelist, allowing her, unlike the tortured Russo, to leave the past behind. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer