Donald Katz - Home Fires

BY JONATHAN ALTER

I first read Home Fires in 1994 and it knocked me out. When you write for a living, you learn to look for the challenges embedded in a project. From the start I saw that Donald Katz had squared the circle. Here was sweeping social history rendered as personal narrativea combination that I thought impossible to execute. The second half of the 20th Century in the United States is a vast canvas of turbulence: Hieronymus Bosch in pastel colors. Katz uses the pointillism of a single Long Island family from 1945 to 1990 to establish an intimacy that is missing from other accounts of the baby boom generation. To say that Home Fires reads like a fine sprawling novel is to give too much credit to most novels, which often lack the social context necessary to bring the characters fully alive. And truth, of course, is often not just stranger but more compelling than fiction. Katzs familial lens on recent history belongs on a shelf with classics. There is Balzac here, and Theodore Dreiser, with a touch of John Gunther, John Dos Passos, and William Manchester. Or imagine if An American Family , the 1971 documentary about the Loud family (and precursor to reality television) had covered five decades of dysfunction.

But I have to admit that the book, while hilarious in parts, also frightened me at the time. My wife had just given birth to our third of three children and we found ourselves, like all young parents, wondering what life would be like for them and for us. The Job-like experience of Sam and Eve Gordon and their four children was not encouraging. Drugs, cults, anonymous sexthese kids did the darndest and most self-destructive things.

In the late 1970s, Sam, who had enjoyed the television show Father Knows Best when his children were young, reviewed the wreckage. Sam thought of himself as a war veteran three times over, Katz writes. Hed survived the battle for subsistence during the Depression, the military battle in Europe, and the battle of raising childrenand this last campaign had been the longest and hardest of all.

Now our children, like those of Don and Leslie Katz, are in their twenties. Their generation has experienced 9/11, two wars, and a severe economic crisis, not to mention dizzying technological innovation and attitudinal shifts on issues like gay marriage. But overall, the social changes of the two decades since Home Fires first appeared are small in comparison to what happened to American society in just a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The world inherited by Susan, Lorraine, Sheila, and Ricky Gordon was turned upside down over and over again. Whether or not their family life was what Susan, a talented writer and drug addict, called a snake pit of emotional depravity, something went terribly wrong after Sam and Eve left the Bronx for Long Island in 1952.

The Gordons, who changed their name from Goldenberg, are Jewish, but they could have as easily been Minnesota Norwegians or New England WASPs who also saw their children sideswiped by the counter-culture, searching through communes and ashrams and crack houses for something they couldnt find inside their suburban childhood homes. And yet the Zelig-like quality of the Gordons keeps taking the story in fresh and often dramatic directions. Bob Dylan, Patty Duke, the Beatles, Tom Hayden, Jann Wenner, Joni Mitchell, Stephen SondheimI lost track of how many major cultural figures of late mid-century America cross paths with family members or someone in their circle, as the story moves to Harlem, Greenwich Village, London, and San Francisco, then back to the Lower East Side where the grandparents started out, with the Beats, yoga, CB radio, AIDS and dozens of other generational experiences in between.

Katz offers telling morsels of social science research and contemporaneous journalism that universalize the bewildering array of incarnations of the Gordon children. The core of the story, though, comes from four years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews that he conducted with all six Gordons and their friends. The same sense of freedom that shaped their lives loosened their tongues. If the consequences of that freedom were at times severe for them, they are wonderful for readers, who often feel as if they are eavesdropping on therapy sessions. To say that Katz has contextualized the Gordons unflinching honesty understates his achievement. He has turned it into a fresh form of literature.

Born in 1952, Don Katz carried his own burdens into this project. His father, a World War II combat veteran and entrepreneur, died at age 47 when Don was 19. After we met and became friends, I learned that Don helped process his own lack of wartime experience by risking his life as a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone and other publications. His first book, The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears , followed his fathers generation as it made its way into large corporations. Home Fires traced the same generational experience in the social realm. After his third book, Just Do It , a look inside the life and work of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, he left professional writing to become an entrepreneur, founding Audible.com, now the largest provider of spoken content.

The tech worlds gain is a loss for readers of narrative nonfiction. But at least we have this astonishing record of the last four decades of the 20th Century. Our children are older now, less scarred by history than the Gordons, and wiserthanks to Home Fires about the world that became our own.