A Family ‘Just Like Us’ : HOME FIRES; An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America <i> By Donald Katz (Aaron Asher/HarperCollins: $25; 624 pp.)</i>

Virtually all Americans who aren’t homeless or living off an inheritance like to think of themselves as middle-class. Being middle-class in America is defined less by an economic or political position than by a state of mind--the belief that one is normal.

At the same time, of course, we long to be unique, and that’s where the family comes in. Its embrace confirms our middle-class normality, but our resistance to its influence confirms our individual difference. The family tests and refines both our ability to conform and our ability to dissent.

If I were to review the topics of my conversations since adolescence, depending on the decade there would be important chunks devoted to sex, politics, movies, rock and roll, and the ultimate nature of being. But wherever I was on my psychic compass or whatever turn the country was taking, talking about other people’s families always carried the greatest fascination.

Like a good American middle-class person, I assume the same is true for you. The Vice President is right to say that we are preoccupied with family values. He’s wrong, however, to think that these values correspond to a rigid and innate moral code. The American fascination with the family, our own and everybody else’s, is less with any specific morality than with the way the family organizes reality for us, its peculiar way of effecting a balance between the values of the outside world and our inner drives. We wonder about how other families effect this balance, and we swing effortlessly between interpretations of the family as refuge and the family as prison--because both are true, both are ways to survive.

Donald Katz’s “Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America” takes on the vast subject of American family life from World War II up to the present. He structures his account on the armature of one Long Island Jewish family--Sam Gordon (changed from Goldenberg in 1950), Eve Samberg Gordon and their four children--Susan (born 1943), Lorraine (1945), Sheila (1949) and Ricky Ian (1956)--as they make their tangled way through American history and culture as well as their own emotional lives. The result is an endearing but finally ambiguous tribute to one family’s survival through tumultuous times, an account made somewhat confusing by the numbers of experts on the family who periodically issue their proclamations.

Katz’s topic is intriguing, and his involvement with the material is impressive. Still, it’s hard to call “Home Fires” successful as analysis, meditation or even survey. A journalist who has been a columnist for Esquire, Katz focused his last book, “The Big Store,” on the inner workings of Sears. But the inner workings of the Gordons, or of any other “typical” family, may be more complex than his method can fathom.

Proceeding year by year, like the pages on a calendar blowing off in an old movie, “Home Fires” is an odd mosaic of family anecdotes, political and social history, magazine articles and pop psychology. Tethered to the real lives of the Gordon family (or at least to the version Katz could extract from them), and lacking the novelist’s freedom to explore motivation, Katz has surrounded them with a chorus of professional psychological and sociological kibitzers on the state of the family, whose own views swing and sway from year to year.

Katz’s account of the early years of Sam and Eve’s young family, as they move out to Long Island and Sam builds his business, is a bit bloodless, perhaps because his informants are not of his own generation. The book begins to gather some force as we hit the ‘60s, the kids grow up and perspectives and ideas begin clashing. By the ‘70s and ‘80s, all the Gordons, including Mom and Dad, are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting each other’s behavior as well. These morsels of introspection are a relief for the reader, since Katz himself refuses to judge, evaluate or otherwise understand the Gordons. Katz seems to believe that this objectivity is a journalistic virtue, but it makes the Gordons’ domestic epic ambiguous as history and as character study.

A glimmer of the Gordons’ humanity does come through now and then, but Katz’s method too often turns them them into a sitcom family. They’re “just like us” (although maybe a bit more flamboyant/funnier/neurotic), and we watch their antics to gauge our own history: Were we better off/worse off/the same? Like the doings of those same sitcom families, too many chapters in the collective life of the Gordons sound like TV Guide outlines, with a dash of the Evening News or People thrown in for significance.

1959: Teen-age Susan feels competitive with her mother’s sexiness; Debbie and Liz fight over Eddie Fisher; Eve feels strangled as a homemaker and walks out of the kitchen; Khrushchev and Nixon have “Kitchen Debate” at Moscow trade fair.

1967: Hippies redefine family; Lorraine admitted to Bellevue with a drug overdose; Sam tries to make Ricky into a “man”; Susan and husband Michael Lydon, recently returned from swinging London, attend fabled Monterey pop concert; Lorraine goes into Sullivanian therapy.

After a few hundred pages, the association of everything that happened to the Gordons with some trend in American culture or media event becomes a little far-fetched. Sam starts watching a lot of TV in 1960, and Nixon loses the debate with Kennedy because he doesn’t have J.F.K.’s ability to use the medium. Carter announces the American “malaise” in 1979, the now heavily addicted Susan on cue falls unconscious into the mashed potatoes and zucchini pancakes at Thanksgiving dinner, and Katz concludes: “The 1970s were like that for a lot of people.”

I don’t think that Katz intends such parallels between individual lives and public events to be funny. Instead, they precisely embody just that combination of uniqueness and typicalness that fascinates him about the Gordons. Eve named her first two daughters after movie stars (Susan for Susan Hayward; Lorraine for Laraine Day), her son after Rick in Casablanca, and there is always an atmosphere of show business in their story. Someone from another (or the same) racial, religious, economic, ethnic or geographic group can reasonably say that the Gordons aren’t typical of their family experience.

But what does make them more than statistics is their frenzied pursuit of the Zeitgeist . You name it--drugs, money, New Journalism, homosexuality, right-wing politics, left-wing politics, est, Africa, bulimia, discovery of religious roots, channeling, crystals, molestation, dysfunctionality, yuppiedom--they are forever trailing the trends, drifting through their appointed rounds at the appropriate times or (more usually) a little later.

Because of Katz’s insistence on seeing almost 50 years of American cultural history entirely through their lens, the Gordons appear as people driven entirely by external forces, defining themselves almost entirely by fad and fashion. Or is that the way they really are? In one of his better lines, Katz refers to “Susan’s animal propensity to make the scene.” But he also can’t resist forcing a parallel: Lorraine gets agoraphobia after disillusionment with her guru Sri Satchidanada, and Katz immediately cites a magazine article of the day that called it “the biggest problem in phobias today.”

Katz’s real subject is how they/you/I fit into history, especially in a period when the urge to be part of your times was so overwhelming and constant. But what he really documents is how this American family and others like it resemble acting schools or theatrical repertory companies. In quest of sincerity and personal salvation through a succession of promises and ideals, the single truth each discovers comes primarily from the approval of an audience, preferably including somebody famous. As Ricky said after meeting Stephen Sondheim, “He talked to me like I was a real person.”

What is significant about the Gordon children, then, isn’t really their enthusiastic participation in virtually everything noteworthy that has happened in American culture since World War II. It’s the overwhelming desire for fame and approval that leads them from trend to trend in a desperate need to be real. Katz falls in with their plans by writing a book about them. In an America where the Vice President has difficulty telling the difference between real and fictional people, that may make them typical indeed.