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

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.

"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