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.
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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
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
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.
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
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
L.S. Klepp
[The novel] telescopes the 1950s culture of hysterical anticommunism with our. . .frantic scandal consumerism.
— Entertainment Weekly
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
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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.
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.
Francine Prose
. . .[D]arkly brilliant. . .a cross between insightful political fiction and a Greek tragedy. . . -- People
L.S. Klepp
[The novel] telescopes the 1950s culture of hysterical anticommunism with our. . .frantic scandal consumerism. -- Entertainment Weekly
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
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 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
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
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
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
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.
From the Publisher
"Roth has done something more wicked than ever before: he has dared to write a wrenching, compaionate, intelligent novel about the life of a good man." Boston Globe"One of Mr. Roth's most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design . . . A fiercely affecting work of art." The New York Times
"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."——Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Observer
"Never before has Roh written fiction with such clear conviction." Time Magazine
"Roth is still at the top of his game . . . one heavy hitter who's playing for keeps." Newsweek
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