I Married a Communist

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Overview

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of 'espionage' for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal.

Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's political tribulations in the dark years of betrayal, the blacklist, and naming names. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one--fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and politically accurate.

Editorial Reviews

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

I Married a Communist is a remarkable work — remarkable in its stringent observation of American life, remarkable in its poignant sense of the contraditions and pathos of human existence, remarkable in its style and its wisdom.
— New York Observer

James Wood

The story. . .has no center, because Ira, who is supposed to be its center, barely exists. . . .Roth . . .has become, in recent books, a very essayistic writer, no longer showing but loudly telling. . . .I Married a Communist is only an essay about politics, and a rather conventional one. —The New Republic

More Reviews (17) Fewer Reviews

L.S. Klepp

[The novel] telescopes the 1950s culture of hysterical anticommunism with our. . .frantic scandal consumerism.
— Entertainment Weekly

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[A] wildly uneven novel that feels both unfinished and overstuffed. . .veers unsteadily between sincerity and slapstickheartfelt melancholy and cavalier manipulation. . . .[the book] may masquerade as a parable about. . .the wages of McCarthyismbut it's actually a smallerless ambitious work. . . —The New York Times

Paul Gray

Constantly mesmerizing. Library shelves groan under the weight of books published about the witch hunts and blacklistings. . .but it would be hard to find one among them that presents as nuanced, as humanely complex an account of those years as I Married a Communist. — Time Magazine

Scott McLemee

Only Philip Roth could have written I Married a Communist; the man's fingerprints are everywhere. You may think of Roth as a novelist of great comic extravagance, his satirical imagination controlled by a realist's sense of detail. Or you may scramble for the exit at the thought of one more book revisiting his core obsessions, namely: 1) the libido and its discontents; and 2) anti-Semitism, particularly its most convoluted form, Jewish self-hatred. These form two sides of a coin that has become a prop for Roth's narrative tricks, in which mirrors have become crucial to the magic act. Even Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, writes novels in which he creates alter egos. No American writer has put himself in greater danger of disappearing up his own keister.

With his most recent work, though, Roth has been climbing back out. As in American Pastoral (1997), Nathan Zuckerman's attention returns to radical politics, and the new book takes place between the fateful election season of 1948, during the last gasp of Communist influence in American political life, and the era of McCarthyism. Chronicling that important transition is part of Nathan's ongoing inventory of his own psyche, but it also anchors the book in public history.

As a teenager longing to write radio plays, Nathan is thrilled to discover that his high school English teacher's brother is Iron Rinn, star of a popular serial about the struggles of the common folk. For a time, Nathan and the actor (born Ira Ringold) become close friends. The novel unfolds as Ira's brother Murray fills in the gaps of Nathan's recollection, decades later. Nathan found in Iron Rinn a surrogate father: more serious and less politically compromising than his biological parent. Only with the passing of time can Nathan grasp the complexities of his hero's marriage to Eve Frame, a legendary silent-screen actress.

As intense as the anger that fuels his political seriousness is Ira's conviction that, should push come to shove, he could return to the masses. Bourgeois life has not made him yield his ideals, at least on anything important. And push does come to shove. Not only is he blacklisted, but when his marriage falls apart, Eve rushes into print with the exposé that gives the novel its title.

This novel's intricate development makes it considerably more engaging than a bald plot-synopsis might suggest. With luck, a reader might even forget that it is a reply to Roth's ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, whose tell-all memoir might as well have been titled "I Married a Clinically Depressed Narcissist." As Ira's brother muses, "Nothing so big in people and nothing so small, nothing so audaciously creative in even the most ordinary as the working of revenge."

Beyond the glint of the knife in its passages of psychological dissection, the novel does a fine job conveying the feel of late 1940s-style American communism, at least in its pop-culture manifestations. The effort to infuse the language of the common people with epic grandeur, the populist sentimentality, the weird combination of Norman Rockwell and Stalin's "Problems of Leninism" -- the whole corny sensibility is rendered here in both its most appealing and its most self-deluded forms.

The picture of McCarthyism is less ambivalent. "When before had betrayal ever been so destigmatized and rewarded in this country?" asks Murray. As Roth licks the wounds to his ego, the novel invokes the birth of media as cultural terrorism. It was an era in which the public discovered "An interesting, manipulative, underground type of pleasure in which there is much that a human being finds appealing." If not appealing, hard to avoid. Now more than ever. -- Salon

Tikkun Magazine

Roth remains a masterful storyteller, and so this latest novel is both engaging and instructive as it recounts the spirit of emerging McCathyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Publishers Weekly

Disconcerting echoes of Roth's relationship with Claire Bloom, as revealed in her memoir, Leaving the Doll's House, haunt Roth's angry but oddly inert 23rd novel. As in American Pastoral, Roth again deals with the Newark of his youth, and with the sons of Jewish immigrants to whom America has given opportunity and even riches -- and how they are swept off course by the forces of history. Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, narrates the story of Ira Ringold, aka Iron Rinn, a supremely idealistic political radical and celebrated radio star of the '50s who is blacklisted and brought to ruin when his wife, Eva Frame (a self-hating Jewish actress born Chava Fromkin), writes an expose called I Married A Communist. The impetus for Eva's treacherous act is Ira's insistence that she evict her 24-year-old daughter from their house; the resemblance to Bloom's revelations of Roth's similar demand is too close to miss, and Roth's shrill belaboring of the issue seems a thinly disguised vendetta. Even high-pitched scenes of family conflict don't bring the novel to life. One problem is that the flat flashback narration shared between the 64-year-old Nathan and Ira's 90-year-old brother, Murray, is stultifyingly dull. Some fine Roth touches do appear: his evocation of the Depression years through the McCarthy era has clarity and vigor. But Ira's aggressively boorish behavior as he struggles with his conscience over having abandoned his Marxist ideals to assume a bourgeois lifestyle is never credible, and his turgid ideological rants against the American government are jackhammers of repetitious invective. In addition, the depiction of an adolescent Nathan as a precocious writer and social philosopher and the saintly Murray's infallible memory of long conversations with Ira -- even between Ira and Eva in bed -- challenge the reader's credulity. For those who lived through the years Roth evokes, this novel will have some resonance. For others, its belligerent tone and lack of dramatic urgency will be a turnoff.

From The Critics

"American Pastoral deconstructed the radical hysteria of the late 1960s . . . [I Married a Communist] deconstructs the reactionary hysteria of the early 1950s . . . Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time in exact pitch . . . I Married a Communist is a remarkable work -- remarkable in its stringent observation of American life, remarkable in its poignant sense of the contradictions and pathos of human existence, remarkable in its style and in its wisdom." --

Library Journal

Roth turns from chaotic '60s (in American Pastoral) to the betrayals of the McCarthy era one decade earlier. When silent-film star Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin) tells the world that her husband, famed radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold), spied for the Commies, all hell breaks loose.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

I Married a Communist is a remarkable work -- remarkable in its stringent observation of American life, remarkable in its poignant sense of the contraditions and pathos of human existence, remarkable in its style and its wisdom. -- New York Observer

Francine Prose

. . .[D]arkly brilliant. . .a cross between insightful political fiction and a Greek tragedy. . . -- People

John Leonard

. . .[A] rant. . . .What's worse, we are bullied. . . .But you know how it is. When someone tells the whole world that you had to be hospitalized for depression because John Updike didn't like Operation Shylock, you tend to hold the kind of grudge that, if indulged, distorts a novel and trivializes an era. -- The Nation

L.S. Klepp

[The novel] telescopes the 1950s culture of hysterical anticommunism with our. . .frantic scandal consumerism. -- Entertainment Weekly

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[A] wildly uneven novel that feels both unfinished and overstuffed. . .veers unsteadily between sincerity and slapstick, heartfelt melancholy and cavalier manipulation. . . .[the book] may masquerade as a parable about. . .the wages of McCarthyism, but it's actually a smaller, less ambitious work. . . -- The New York Times

Robert Kelly

Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit. . . .a gripping novel, memorable, its characters hateful and adorable by turns. -- New York Times Book Review

Robert Stone

His latest novel is a bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past. . .What I Married a Communist tells us above all is that Philip Roth is very much with us as a writer, every bit as contemporary and vital as he was when he began. . . Philip Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was 40 yeares ago. -- New York Review of Books

Walter Kirn

...[E]xtends Roth's streak while narrowing its scope....less a chorus than a debate, a pageant of argument and dialectic....linguistic turmoil, rather than the political, that Roth sets out to caputure....The impulse is archival, antiquarian....highlights the erotic angle....best parts are its oratorical flights; its story hardly leaves the ground. -- New York Magazine

Kirkus Reviews

Following the spectacular success of its immediate predecessor,American Pastoral, Roth's ambitious new novel is another chronicle of innocence and idealism traduced—the demolition of what one of its characters calls 'the myth of your own goodness.'

That character is Murray Ringold, a nonagenarian former schoolteacher whose meeting with his onetime student (and recurring Roth character), novelist Nathan Zuckerman, triggers a complex reconstruction of the infamous life of Murray's younger brother Ira. As 'Iron Rinn,' a radio star. married to one of the country's most revered radio actresses, Ira had become a beloved public figure renowned for his impersonations of Abraham Lincoln (whom he physically resembled) and for patriotic broadcasts celebrating America's working poor. Nathan, who grew up in the '40s as a fledgling liberal intellectual whose heroes were radio playwright Norman Corwin and left-wing novelist Howard Fast, adored the charismatic Ira, even after the latter's wife denounced him as a duplicitous 'zealot' in her explosive memoir,I Married a Communist. The story of Ira's violent youth, spectacular career, and eventual disgrace is rather ham-fistedly assembled from Nathan's own memories (as Iron Rinn's devoted acolyte), the stories Ira told him, and—most movingly—the immensely detailed recollections poured forth by the ever-garrulous Murray Ringold (brilliantly portrayed as a bundle of fiery intellectual and moral energies undimmed by old age; a sturdy exemplar of 'the disciplined sadness of stoicism').

The character of Murray is the triumph of this often inventive but gratingly discursive novel, whose dramatic content is frequently upstaged by such indulgences as Ira's lengthy political diatribes, Nathan's summaries of favorite literary works (such as Arthur Miller's Focus), and Murray's exhausting (if agreeably savage) remembrance of Richard Nixon's state funeral. Despite its superb re-creation of the conflicted 1940s and the ordeal of the American Left, along with a plethora of sharply realized ideologues at verbal war, this very talky book is an example of Roth at his most forceful and eloquent, though perhaps rather less than his best.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375707216
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/28/1999
Edition description: VINTAGE
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 394,747
Series: Nathan Zuckerman Series
Product dimensions: 5.19 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Philip Roth

In 1997 PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral . In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. He has also won American PEN’s two highest awards: the PEN/Nabokov and PEN/Bellow awards. He is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

Biography

Philip Roth's long and celebrated career has been something of a thorn in the side of the writer. As it is for so many, fame has been the proverbial double-edged sword, bringing his trenchant tragic-comedies to a wide audience, but also making him a prisoner of expectations and perceptions. Still, since 1959, Roth has forged along, crafting gorgeous variations of the Great American Novel and producing, in addition, an autobiography (The Facts) and a non-fictional account of his father's death (Patrimony: A True Story).

Roth's novels have been oft characterized as "Jewish literature," a stifling distinction that irks Roth to no end. Having grown up in a Jewish household in a lower-middle-class sub-section of Newark, New Jersey, he is incessantly being asked where his seemingly autobiographical characters end and the author begins, another irritant for Roth. He approaches interviewers with an unsettling combination of stoicism, defensiveness, and black wit, qualities that are reflected in his work. For such a high-profile writer, Roth remains enigmatic, seeming to have laid his life out plainly in his writing, but refusing to specify who the real Philip Roth is.

Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus instantly established him as a significant writer. This National Book Award winner was a curious compendium of a novella that explored class conflict and romantic relationships and five short stories. Here, fully formed in Roth's first outing, was his signature wit, his unflinching insightfulness, and his uncanny ability to satirize his character's situations while also presenting them with humanity. The only missing element of his early work was the outrageousness he would not begin to cultivate until his third full-length novel Portnoy's Complaint -- an unquestionably daring and funny post-sexual revolution comedy that tipped Roth over the line from critically acclaimed writer to literary celebrity.

Even as Roth's personal relationships and his relationship to writing were severely shaken following the success of Portnoy's Complaint, he continued publishing outrageous novels in the vein of his commercial breakthrough. There was Our Gang, a parodic attack on the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a truly bizarre take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, and My Life as a Man, the pivotal novel that introduced Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman would soon be the subject of his very own series, which followed the writer's journey from aspiring young artist with lofty goals to a bestselling author, constantly bombarded by idiotic questions, to a man whose most important relationships have all but crumbled in the wake of his success. The Zuckerman Trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Counterlife) directly paralls Roth's career and unfolds with aching poignancy and unforgiving humor.

Zuckerman would later reemerge in another trilogy, although this time he would largely be relegated to the role of narrator. Roth's American Trilogy (I Married a Communist, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), shifts the focus to key moments in the history of late-20th –century American history.

In Everyman (2006) , Roth reaches further back into history. Taking its name from a line of 15th-century English allegorical plays, Everyman is classic Roth -- funny, tragic, and above all else, human. It is also yet another in a seemingly unbreakable line of critical favorites, praised by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Library Journal.

In 2007's highly anticipated Exit Ghost, Roth returned Nathan Zuckerman to his native Manhattan for one final adventure, thus bringing to a rueful, satisfying conclusion one of the most acclaimed literary series of our day. While this may (or may not) be Zuckerman's swan song, it seems unlikely that we have seen the last Philip Roth. Long may he roar.

Good To Know

Before publishing his first novel, Roth wrote an episode of the suspenseful TV classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

A film adaptation of American Pastoral is currently in the works. Australian director Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence; Patriot Games) is on board to direct.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Philip Milton Roth
2. Hometown:
  
  Connecticut
1. Date of Birth:
  
  March 19, 1933
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Newark, New Jersey
1. Education:
  
  B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Read an Excerpt

Ira Ringold's brother, Murray, discusses Ira's tortuous marriage: “There were nights I couldn't sleep. I'd say to [my wife] Doris, Why doesn't he leave? Why can't he leave?' And do you know what Doris would answer? Because he's like everybody—you only realize things when they're over. Why don't you leave me? All the human stuff that makes it hard for anybody to be with anybody else—don't we have it? We have arguments. We have disagreements. We have what everybody has—the little this and the little that, the little insults that pile up, the little temptations that pile up. Don't you think I know that there are women who are attracted to you? Teachers at school, women in the union, powerfully attracted to my husband? Don't you think I know you had a year, after you got back from the war, when you didn't know why you were still with me, when you asked yourself every day, “Why don't I leave her?” But you didn't. Because by and large people don't. Everyone's dissatisfied, but by and large not leaving is what people do. Especially people who've been left themselves, like you and your brother. Come through what you two came through and you value stability very highly. Probably overvalue it. The hardest thing in the world is to cut the knot of your life and leave. People make ten thousand adjustments to even the most pathological behavior. Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit." Murray Ringold on betrayal: “All those antagonisms,” Murray said, “and then the torrent of betrayal. Every soul its own betrayal factory. For whatever reason: survival, excitement, advancement, idealism. For the sake of the damage that can be done, the pain that can be inflicted. For the cruelty in it. For the pleasure in it. The pleasure of manifesting one's latent power. The pleasure of dominating others, of destroying people who are your enemies. You're surprising them. Isn't that the pleasure of betrayal? The pleasure of tricking somebody. It's a way to pay people back for a feeling of inferiority they arouse in you, of being put down by them, a feeling of frustration in your relationship with them. Their very existence may be humiliating to you, either because you aren't what they are or because they aren't what you are. And so you give them their comeuppance.
“Of course there are those who betray because they have no choice. I read a book by a Russian scientist who, in the Stalin years, betrayed his best friend to the secret police. He was under heavy interrogation, terrible physical torture for six months—at which point he said, Look, I cannot resist any longer, so please tell me what you want. Whatever you give me I will sign.' “He signed whatever they wanted him to sign. He was himself sentenced to life in prison. Without parole. After fourteen years, in the sixties, when things changed, he was released and he wrote this book. He says that he betrayed his best friend for two reasons: because he was not able to resist the torture and because he knew that it didn't matter, that the result of the trial was already established. What he said or didn't say would make no difference. If he didn't say it, another tortured person would. He knew his friend, whom he loved to the end, would despise him, but under brutal torture a normal human being cannot resist. Heroism is a human exception. A person who lives a normal life, which is made up of twenty thousand little compromises every day, is untrained to suddenly not compromise at all, let alone to withstand torture...
"Betrayal is an inescapable component of living—who doesn't betray?—but to confuse the most heinous public act of betrayal, treason, with every other form of betrayal was not a good idea in 1951. Treason, unlike adultery, is a capital offense, so reckless exaggeration and thoughtless imprecision and false accusation, even just the seemingly genteel game of naming names—well, the results could be dire in those dark days when our Soviet allies had betrayed us by staying in Eastern Europe and exploding an atomic bomb and our Chinese allies had betrayed us by making a Communist revolution and throwing out Chiang Kai-shek. Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung: there was the moral excuse for it all.
“The lying. A river of lies. Translating the truth into a lie. Translating one lie into another lie. The competence people display in their lying. The skill. Carefully sizing up the situation and then, with a calm voice and a straight face, delivering the most productive lie. Should they speak even the partial truth, nine times out of ten it's inn behalf of a lie." On McCarthyism and moral disgrace as public entertainment: “But that's what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journaaaaalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it's because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper's half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world's oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.
“McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy's patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That's how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. McCarthy was an impresario, and the wilder the views, the more outrageous the charges, the greater the disorientation and the better the all-around fun." Copyright (C) 1998 by Philip Roth. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Reading Group Guide

1. As Nathan's high school English teacher, Murray Ringold tells him that "In human society, thinking's the greatest transgression of all" [p. 2]. Do the events of his life, and his brother's, bear out this opinion?

2. Murray describes Ira's private life as "a grave misfortune replete with farce" [p. 3]. Would this describe his public life as well? Which aspects of his public life were tragic, which merely farcical? How are Ira's private and public lives inextricably linked? What about Eve's? How does Roth link private betrayal with the public variety?

3. Ira becomes famous by impersonating Abraham Lincoln; he dies, eventually, from the same rare disease Lincoln suffered from. Why does Roth stress similarities and parallels between Ira and Lincoln? What things does he imply about Ira by making the comparison? Does Ira have any justification in likening himself to American revolutionaries like Lincoln, Paine and Jefferson?

4. The young Nathan, enthusiastic about the Progressive Party, sees his father as someone who has made fatal compromises, and Ira as uncompromising. What compromises has Ira, in fact, made? Does the author imply that compromise is inevitable, even good and necessary? If so, do you agree with him?

5. Nathan is attracted by Ira's early orphaning, by his social and familial unrootedness, largely because he himself is so very rooted in his own family and culture. What effect does a father, or the lack of a father, have on a young man's life? What purpose do surrogate fathers serve? Is Nathan correct to define manhood as "the orphanhood that is total" [p. 217]?

6. "As a Communist, " says Murray,"[Ira] should be irritated by her from the first second. So what explains this marriage with her and not with a comrade?" [p. 82]. What does explain it? Does the fact that Ira sees Eve as a "challenge" [p. 83] provide reason enough, or is the situation more complex than that?

7. Is Sylphid presented as a villain, or as someone to be pitied? How much sympathy do you have for her? How much sympathy do Nathan and Murray have for her? Who is most to blame in the self-destructive mother-daughter relationship, Eve or Sylphid, and how has Eve contributed to making Sylphid what she is? In what ways are mother and daughter similar?

8. Ira presents himself as a searingly honest man, and seems actually to believe that this is so. Yet he consistently lies about the two vital facts of his life: that he is a Communist, and that he is a murderer. Does your knowledge of these lies imply, to you, that he is dishonest about other things? That he is in fact dishonest by nature?

9. Several characters give blistering summaries of Ira as they perceive him. Katrina van Tassel calls him "an ignorant man, and a naive man, and a rude man, a bullying, simple-minded, arrogant man" [p. 149]; his former friend Goldstine says "Mankind at its stupidest doesn't come any stupider. I've always been scared of you. You're a wild man" [p. 97]; Johnny O'Day says "He wasn't a revolutionary, he wasn't a Lincoln, he wasn't anything. He wasn't a man" [p. 288]. Are these characterizations correct? Or are they too ruthless in their assessments? What valuable qualities does Ira possess, if any? Is he in fact, as Murray believes, "by and large, " "virtuous" [p. 181]?

10. How did Ira's childhood experiences turn him toward violence and murder? How, afterward, did his murder of Strollo shape the rest of his life? Murray says that Ira's "whole life had been looking for a way not to kill somebody" [p. 292]. Into what other arenas does Ira deflect his violent impulses? At what times is his violent nature most in evidence?

11. Do you agree with Nathan that both Ira and Murray are "historical casualties" [p. 318]? What does he mean by that term? How might their lives have unfolded if they had lived in more peaceful times?

12. "I believe I have made the least harmful choice, " Nathan says about his chosen way of life [p. 71]. Harmful to what, and to whom? Are there any clues in I Married a Communist, or in Roth's other novels, to indicate why Nathan lives in such a monastic fashion?

13. Iron RinnIra Ringold was the teenaged Nathan's hero. What does this imply about our youthful ideas of heroes? Who, if anyone, might be the real hero of this story? Of the historical era?

14. If you have read American Pastoral, the novel that preceded I Married a Communist, how would you compare the two "heroes, " Swede Levov and Ira Ringold? Are the two men similar, and if so, in what ways? How innocent is each of them, and how guilty? To what degree are both utopianists, and how realistic are their utopias?

15. What does I Married a Communist tell us about ourselves as Americans: about specifically American mores, values, fantasies, and character? In what ways were HUAC and the MacCarthy crisis characteristically American phenomena, possible only in this country?

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Anonymous

Posted March 9, 2000

Form without real substance

I greatly enjoy Phillip Roth's writing style, and strongly recommend 'Portnoy's Complaint' and 'American Pastoral', both available in audiotape versions. Mr. Roth's writing style is again evident in 'I married a communist' with excellent word choice and an ability to recreate the feelings behind his characters words. Ron Silver's reading helps too. No complaints about the reading, I liked it fine. This novel is narrated from the piont of view of Nathan Zuckerman, but is about some obscure character named Ira, and his brother, wife, stepdaughter, army buddies, etc. Poor Ira suffers from Marfans syndrome, an affliction that makes him loook like Abe Lincoln, and requires that he get a special kind of massage three times a week. But I had a real hard time making out a storyline or plot throughout most of the work. The timeline shifts back and forth, but for no apparent reason. Maybe it would have made more sense if Mr. Roth stuck to chronological order, but that would not be his style. I got the sense that I came in on the middle of an evolving story, and by the time I thought I had a handle on who was who and what was going on, the novel was over. And it's a long novel. I had a hard time enjoying it, and it got boring. I hate to have to say that, because Phillip Roth is far and away my favorite author. I will buy his next work anyway, I am sure, if there is one. Can't highly recommend this one, though.
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Posted February 7, 2010

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Posted January 19, 2012

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I Married a Communist

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Form without real substance