HOME FIRES

An in-depth personal/sociological/cultural saga of one US family, 1945-90. Beginning with Sam Gordon's 1945 return from WW II to his wife and two-year-old daughter in Brooklyn, Katz (The Big Store, winner of the 1988 Heartland Prize for nonfiction) tells the life story of the Gordons and their three daughters and son. Integral to Katz's narrative are the social trends, generational perspectives, movies, books, and music that shape and texture the Gordons' lives. Thus in the Fifties, the Gordons live by the widely touted ideal of ``togetherness,'' all sitting down after dinner to an evening of TV. By the late Sixties, though, when the daughters have their own families, psychological pundits have declared that the nuclear family's rigid togetherness breeds psychoses and emotional damage. Sam Gordon, the personification of American blue-collar, work-hard-and-better-your-lot ethic, is bewildered when his daughter moves into the East Village squalor of his childhood, and disappointed in his only son, who grows up to be a gay art-song composer (though Ricky eventually becomes the apple of Sam's eye). Susan, born in 1943, enjoys the most dramatic story. Winning a scholarship to Vassar, she becomes a successful writer—covering the 1967 ``First Human Be-in'' in Golden Gate Park for Newsweek, and receiving a $10,000 advance from Random House for a pre-Kate Millett feminist analysis of sex. By 1987, though, she's a junkie living on the street. The trouble with Katz's account is that, despite its immense detail and careful meshing of familial foreground and social background, it sometimes seems historical and cold, with the cultural artifacts surrounding the Gordons often the most typical and obvious ones of years past. Of interest but not quite a match for William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream (1974), the brilliant cultural history to which Katz's book, with its twist of family overlay, owes much. (Sixteen-page b&w photo insert—not seen.)