Here’s why Francine Prose is a better writer than you or me—she can craft a sentence like, “Tony was very funny, though when you say that about a person, you can’t think of one funny thing that they said, just as you can describe someone as charming without being able to begin to explain what charm is, exactly.” Beyond the elegant grammatical balance of this relatively long sentence, there’s Prose’s unfolding insight. Yes, we get a sense of Tony’s character, but even more so learn about our own. How much of the world we sense but can’t limn, point to, but fail to name.
Such considerations are at the very heart of Prose’s memoir, a Blakean tale of innocence succumbing to experience, of the passion and desire for change of the 1960s sliding into the conformity and a collusion with capitalism of the 1970s. As she sagely puts it, “People often talked about being true to themselves. But by 1974, what they meant by truth was beginning to shift from the collective to the individual, from political action to personal fulfillment. My truth, they began to say.”
Care to read the rest then at California Review of Books.
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