1974 A Personal History

Francine Prose is a prolific author of novels and nonfiction, as well as a writing professor. Her first memoir focuses on a pivotal year. She narrates with a halting cadence and a kind of singsong delivery, yet her tone sounds flat. More's the pity--her prose is elegant, and she's a fine storyteller, setting the listener squarely in San Francisco of the year 1974, when she had a relationship with Tony Russo, Daniel Ellsberg's accomplice in the theft of the files that became THE PENTAGON PAPERS. Prose defines this period as a time when the "ideas of the previous decade" became "monetized." There's a fine rendering of not great sex and a terrific exegesis of Hitchcock's VERTIGO. But try the print edition. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2024]