For a while there I thought Gornick seeing her communist past in her feminist present might work against her desire to recomplicate the lives of American communists, but in the end the only pattern she draws is complexity of engagement and progress. I can live with that - in fact, I might have to.

This is a book full of people who have breathed in more politics than they have cigarette smoke and if you read it you'll see that's no small feat. The stories of disillusionment and self-suffocation are attentively told but familiar and the ones that deal with the real poverty of 20th century America could do with being drawn out a bit.

The parts that have to do with what it's like to be involved in a human struggle that's bigger than your own, meanwhile, capture a particular set of experiences more vividly than I've seen them conveyed anywhere else. I read this alongside Edwin Morgan's translated Sovpoems, which does not exist on Goodreads. Taken in tandem, these two very different books prompted a lot of hard questions about what it means to live both seriously and freely. That they both make this process of self-interrogation actively pleasurable is to their credit.