House Of Pain, Place of Denial

By Bruce W. Nelan

TITLE: HOME FIRES

AUTHOR: DONALD KATZ

PUBLISHER: HARPERCOLLINS; 615 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: The unpretty saga of an American family is brilliantly delivered.

The Gordons, who star in Donald Katz's vividly reported chronicle of "One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America," are real people, not composites or fictional characters. They bear no resemblance to the antic moms, dads and kids of television sitcoms. They do call to mind that scene in slasher movies in which a young woman hesitates before stepping into the darkness of a house filled with lurking horrors. You can't believe she is going to do something so frighteningly unwise, but she does. In Home Fires, the Gordons all do.

Sam Goldenberg, soon to be Sam Gordon, paterfamilias, returns from World War II to his wife Eve and his two-year-old daughter Susan. He is a skilled electrician, a confirmed workaholic, and he provides his growing family with a new house on Long Island, N.Y., a Cadillac, a boat -- everything but a fatherly presence. When he is not puttering with a new speedboat, he is climbing through the ranks at the local Masonic temple. Eve, a former singer at Catskill resorts, raises her three daughters and son on the Don't-let-Daddy-know principle. The children say there were also things their mother "did not want to see or hear or know" and dub her "the Queen of Denial."

Katz conceived his book as a "saga of the sort usually found in novels," and that is what he delivers brilliantly. In a morbidly fascinating chapter for each year from 1945 to 1990, the Gordon daughters and son wander into every haunted house they catch a glimpse of.

! As teenagers, Susan and her sister Lorraine are climbing out of their windows to rendezvous with boyfriends with police records. After graduating from Vassar, Susan becomes a successful feminist writer and then a heroin addict, street drug peddler and shoplifter. Lorraine, pregnant and married at 17, is also a heroin addict but switches to brown rice, three more husbands and homeopathic remedies at an ashram in Yogaville, Va.

The third Gordon daughter, Sheila, experiments with LSD, marries her high school sweetheart, dumps him and begins a six-year course of psychotherapy. Ricky, who is gay, has a tormented childhood and suffers from LSD flashbacks and bulimia. A musician and composer, he is also a passionate believer in New Age fads, especially the healing powers of crystals. He has watched several friends die of AIDS and has no intention of finding out whether he is infected.

Katz began the interviews for Home Fires four years ago and obviously became fond of the Gordons. He is pleased that they now seem at peace with themselves and the faith that even "the most wounded of families could eventually heal." Readers will be forgiven if they attribute some of the Gordons' semihappy ending to sheer exhaustion.