I Married a Communist: American Trilogy (2) (Vintage International)

Roth has the desirable ability both to revel in the particular and to present a visionary view of the general. I Married a Communist is a perfect display of this twin-treasure. Indeed, there is even a coy passage that seems to indicate this self-awareness: “Politics is the great generalizer, and literature the great particularizer.” And again: “Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature.” One might be fooled by the title and various blurbs for the novel into thinking that this solely is the story of American politics in the Cold War, invoking the McCarthyist threat and the Communist witch-hunts in the early 1950’s. It is certainly that, but Roth presents a much grander vision of the human condition. Again, in almost contradictory form, he particularizes in astute detail the personalities and flaws of his characters to demonstrate that individuals share the human condition and are not all that different after all. Much of the general thrust of the book depicts a negative view of life, the problems we all inevitably face. Roth, as usual, takes no sides and leaves no stone unturned in his assault on everything. That Roth can pierce the veil on any sort of positive valence, thereby dragging out potential problems, is mitigated only by his own self-flagellation – not even his own putative character (Nathan Zuckerman) gets off the hook. There is something refreshing, though, in this kind of literary honesty, this unadulterated look into the realities of life. Ira Ringold, the great Iron Rinn, is presented as a towering figure initially, only to be steadily and mercilessly chipped away throughout the story, the unmaking of a great statue into mere formless stone. Ira’s communism, as well as his downfall because of it, is known from the jump. Roth, in classic form, can drop tiny bombs onto his audience by, for example, unceremoniously inserting the brief details of the protagonist’s death, weaving it almost translucently into the story’s larger current. The usual plot elements in a story, typically introduced in stepwise fashion, are exploded by Roth. He is not the only author to explode this formula, of course, but he does it in a unique fashion, flipping the traditional importance of moments like death, and instead imposing the importance of mulling aloud, philosophically, about life, which, no matter how one cuts it, inescapably ends in death. There is a certain fatalism, running as an undercurrent, pulsing through the book. This is applied dualistically to the political story, as well to the personal story. Often the two narratives step overtly onto one another. I offer a few passages to serve the point. “He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.” Roth takes us on Ira’s journey from a nameless ditchdigger to a respected, imperious Union Boss, to famous radio actor and polemicist personality, to love-weakened family man, all the way back to nameless nobody – persona non grata – living off the grid. Little hope was injected into the possible trajectory of Ira’s life. Here is another passage displaying the fatalistic tendencies in which Roth splashes so refreshingly, this time in the political vein: “Gossip as gospel, the national faith. […] McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. […] That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment.” Naturally, there is uplift to be found in Roth’s sardonic humor and fearless observation, if nothing else. “His recourse to violence was the masculine correlate of her predisposition to hysteria – distinctive gender manifestations of the same waterfall.” Interestingly, there is also a prescience – a premonitory aura – of the “woke” hysteria on the far left that we see at the time of this writing. (Roth, like Orwell, had no qualms about eviscerating any political or psychological position in his quest for undaunted honesty.) “The public machine she wanted to destroy Ira begins to turn against her. It has to. This is America. The moment you start this public machine, no other end is possible except a catastrophe for everybody.” More directly to the point about the Mccarthyist ghost still lingering: “…even just the seemingly genteel game of naming names, well the results could be dire in those dark days.” This is not an especially uplifting tale. There is betrayal. There is hysteria. There is dishonesty. There is murder. There is fatalism. But even so, Roth manages to dig so deep into the truth of our lives, both individually and collectively, that the lingering impression is a positive one. How insightful, how moving, are lines like the following? “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.” Here again: “When you loosen yourself, as I tried to, from all the obvious delusions – religion, ideology, Communism – you’re still left with the myth of your own goodness. Which is the final delusion.” Roth, it seems to me, can deliver a positive gut-punch in the disguise of hard-to-hear honesty. “Eve didn’t marry a Communist; she married a man perpetually hungering after his life. That’s what enraged him and confused him and that’s what ruined him: he could never construct one that fit.” So, perhaps the takeaway is that we can recognize our own pathologies – both individually and therefore collectively – and construct a life that doesn’t just “fit,” but is also good. We can bypass the “myth of our own goodness,” and create something real and honest from the ashes of self-awareness. One hopes as much is possible. Then again, the continuity of great literature seems to suggest that figuring it out is perpetually difficult.

Wonderful writing,deeply philosophical but also fairly depressing.Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors,however.

"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In many respects, the two most recent novels of Philip Roth represent a long meditation on Tolstoi's famous observation and suggest a common wellspring of the unhappy family narratives. Roth goes as far as to put Tolstoi's words into the mouth of Murray Ringold, the high school English teacher who taught Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, the virtues of "cri-ti-cal thinking" and who, near the end of his life some fifty years later, unfolds the fate of his brother Ira, the radio personality "Iron Rinn" and young Nathan's boyhood mentor. Forget what you have read about I Married a Communist as Roth's roman a clef payback for Claire Bloom's recent memoire of her difficult life with the novelist. It is much, much more and is of a thematic and emotional fabric with Roth's great American Pastoral. Roth's project, of which this is the second installment, now seems to be "Nathan Zuckerman's America," thickly textured stories of lives collectively deranged and rendered dysfunctional by America and its political demons, now the MacCarthy era, Red-hunting, and the blacklist. Along the way we have countless carefully observed digressions on, among other things, taxidermy, how to make "literature," New Jersey's geology, the power of "the word," the triumph of lowbrow, and (of course) Newark in the 'forties and 'fifties. One remains in awe of Roth's undiminished ability to mine his own experience, augmented by prodigious research, to turn out superb, universal novels like I Married a Communist. Is he our greatest novelist? Consider the oeuvre--Portnoy, The Zuckerman tetralogy (which includes the magical The Ghost Writer), The Counterlife, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, and now this--and compare his accomplishment to that of any living American writer. It isn't even close.

This is my third Roth book narrated by his alter ego narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. It tells the story of Ira Ringold, presumptive working class hero laid low and finally destroyed by the political and cultural forces let loose during the McCarthy Era. I won't give out too many details, but suffice to say, that like many stories of those who were destroyed personally and professionally during that time, very little is simple and cut and dried. Much has been written about Roth's motivations behind telling this story. And at times it's easy to tell where he goes off the rails and lets bitterness get in the way of his words and the story. But don't let that stop you from reading on. It's in the end a story well told and eminently readable. I won't say enjoy. It is a tragic tale! But the writing is pure Roth. And I have found that to be more than enough.

Philip Roth's I MARRIED A COMMUNIST, 1998, is one of his Zuckerman books, but one in which the author's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman simply narrates: the story of Ira Ringgold, whom he had known since his Newark Jewish childhood, as Ira was the brother of one of his favorite teachers, Murray Ringgold. Ira, perhaps defined by the fact that he was big, and rough, coming from a rough neighborhood as the Ringgold brothers did, began life as a teenage ditch digger in 1930s Depression Newark. Rode the rails, worked all over the country, as a miner, a steel worker. Joined the Army and fought during World War II. Improbably became a big radio star, and married an even bigger radio star, Eve Frame, who had been a very very big silent film star. (People who are familiar with the lives of some celebrities may well feel that Eve, a self-hating Jew born Brooklyn's Chave Fromkin, who climbs the social ladder by imitating her betters, including their anti-semitism, strongly resembles the beautiful actress Claire Bloom, one of Roth's ex-wives. And that Roth is here further pursuing his quarrels with her.) At any rate, the fictional Eve delivers Ira into quite a desirable lifestyle, based in a Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York townhouse, beautifully furnished, where she frequently entertains glittering figures in the arts and literature. But he can't get on with her daughter from a previous marriage, Sylphid. And Ira is a confirmed, dedicated Communist, bullying everyone around him with his political views, furthermore using his radio show to put forth the party's views. Then, in the early postwar years, comes the House Un-American Activities Committee, with its Inquisitional hearings intent on driving so-called Communists and fellow travelers from entertainment, and any other influential positions in American life. Demanding that its victims `name names' of other political undesirables. Creating various abominable blacklists that prevented its victims' employment, and hounded them into suicide and exile. The House hearings to be followed, in the 1950s, by the even more damaging Senate hearings of "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy. Initially, Ira is protected by his relationship to Eve, but soon enough, his unstable marriage starts to crack up. And she publishes a bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow." He is destroyed, personally and professionally. Because of him, even his brother, the teacher, loses his job; the McCarthyite witch hunters don't hold with Red schoolteachers, either. Ultimately, Zuckerman will be told that the witchhunt even reached out to him: he failed to receive the Fulbright Scholarship he was expecting, as he was thought to be a nephew of the Ringgolds. In the 1990s, Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony : A True Story ,(1991); the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock : A Confession , (1993); the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater , (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral , (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I MARRIED A COMMUNIST. This greatly-talented, multi-award winning, world famous American author is, however, probably best known for his massively popular earlier books, Goodbye, Columbus ; Portnoy's Complaint and When She Was Good . This book, told in long, dull, improbable flashback by Zuckerman and Murray, is probably best only for his more devoted fans, and/or those particularly interested in this dark period. But make no mistake about it; despite its flaws, here, in the guise of social history, Roth has created a vivid portrait of a bad time long gone.

A good story, chiefly of the narrator's relationship with a fiery communist, but too broken up to be Roth at his best.

I had read about the "revenge" factor in this Roth novel and perhaps because I wasn't quite familiar with the principals (on whom this book was supposedly based on), I ignored the negative spin and just enjoyed the story for what it was ... an invaluable lesson for all writers no matter their genre ... when Leo explains to Nathan why he should ignore the ideology and stick to the art, epiphanies (right or wrong) abound ... there was no putting this one down and the reward (for this reader) was all confirming. Whether it was Murray's decency or Nathan's naivety or Ira's iron will, the story flowed with passion start to finish. The fact there are parents who are victims (and/or) martyrs to their children (and/or their cause(s)) is undeniable (so who needs the revenge spin?). What flows from such a starting point is (probably) almost always disaster. Whether Roth is a brute or not in real life is irrelevant (not to forget the other side of the story--that he may be one hell of a decent human being), do yourself a big favor and ignore the revenge spin. Wagner was an anti-semite but much of his music remains hauntingly heavenly. Roth remains an American/World master of modern fiction.

Roth is especially good at describing character. His characters here, as in most of his books are wonderfully quirky and unique. Ira Ringold, alias Iron Rin, is not only a fictional victim of the blacklisting of the McCarthy era. Roth is able to impart to his main character an energy and complexity that really humanizes him. While the book addresses a serious subject and fully probes the tragedy of its main character, it also contains many of Roth's funny, satirical twists on the Hollywood actress Ira marries, who is trying to hide her Jewish origins. And the antics of her bizarre, almost incestual relationship with her threateningly eccentric, musician daughter, Sylphid (who but Roth could come up with a name like that), are often hilarious. The characters here are bigger than life, as many of Roth's are, and their frequent grotesqueness gives comic relief to a book that could have easily been pure pathos, given the subject. While Ira is outsized, almost Rabelaisian, the stable wisdom of his older brother, Murray, serves as balance wheel. A retired teacher, Murray is being interviewed at 90 by Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego writer.

This is the story of Ira Ringold, a Jew from Newark who becomes a big star on radio and then is destroyed in the period of the McCarthy witch-hunts. This is the story of a failed marriage; of toxic family relationships; of male adolescence and male role models and masculinity; of morality and its lack; of ageing; of literature; of anti-Semitism; of politics; of fanaticism; of hypocrisy; of betrayal. This is the story of a particular America in a particular time and place; a story that presages the America of today. I Married a Communist is the second volume of what is known as Roth’s American Trilogy, preceded by American Pastoral, which I declared to be The Great American Novel, and followed by The Human Stain. They are not a trilogy in the sense that the word tends to be used today – each of these stands complete on its own, connected only in the sense that the three together are Roth’s attempt to make sense of America at the end of the 20th century by looking back over the decades of the mid-century. In each the story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a barely disguised alter-ego of Roth himself. When Murray Ringold, once Nathan’s English teacher and later friend, and now an old man, attends a summer school at the university where Zuckerman, himself now a man in his 60s, teaches, they spend the evenings together, and over the course of the week Murray tells Zuckerman the story of his younger brother, Ira. Nathan knew Ira too once, when Nathan was young and impressionable and Ira was at his peak as a star and as a man. Ira was a formative influence on the young boy, a second father figure, and for a time he was the most important person in Nathan’s life. But as Nathan grew up he grew away from Ira, so although he knew in broad outline what had happened to him, this is the first time he has heard Ira’s later story in detail. As Murray fills in the gaps of Ira’s earlier and later life, Zuckerman also tells the reader of the man he knew, looking back with the eyes of age and experience and reassessing his youthful judgement of the man. The story is simple and we are told near the beginning how Ira’s downfall came about. At the height of his stardom he married Eve Frame, once a Hollywood starlet and now also a radio star. The marriage was disastrous, for which Ira placed the blame squarely on Eve’s grown-up daughter Sylphid and on Eve’s weakness in letting Sylphid domineer over her. Eve may have felt that Ira’s penchant for infidelity had something to do with it, though. When Ira leaves her, Eve publishes a memoir of their marriage in which she claims he is a communist taking orders from the Kremlin and betraying America. In the McCarthy era, this accusation alone is enough to destroy Ira’s career. Part of what Murray will tell Nathan is how Ira reacted to his downfall and how the rest of his life played out. But the story is to a large extent a vehicle for Zuckerman/Roth to dissect the various characters and the wider society. The question is not whether Ira was a communist – we know that he was – but why. He too, as Nathan with him, was influenced by an older man that he loved as a friend and mentor. But there’s a feeling that to him being a communist was an ego thing – something that separated him from the common herd, that allowed him to feel superior. Yes, he cared about those in society who were disadvantaged, but he also enjoyed the luxury and celebrity that came with his marriage to Eve even as he ranted against her and her friends. Nathan’s outgrowing of him is beautifully observed – as Nathan matures and goes off to college where he spends time with really educated and intelligent men, Ira diminishes in his eyes. Perhaps Ira’s tragedy is that he never outgrew his own mentor. It has been claimed that Ira’s marriage to Eve is based on Roth’s own failed marriage to Claire Bloom, and that the book is a vicious response to Bloom’s memoirs in which she painted an unflattering picture of Roth. This may be so, but I don’t think it matters – it works at a literary level and in truth the reader – this reader, anyway – sympathises slightly more with Eve than with Ira, although both are weak and selfish. Through Eve, Roth goes into the question of Jewish self-hate – anti-Semitism practised by Jews themselves. I found this aspect fascinating – it was something I’d never considered before. Roth shows how this is a response to society’s anti-Semitism, where some Jews find it easier to try to hide their identity and join in rather than spend a lifetime battling prejudice. It made me think of African Americans “passing”, which in fact is the subject of The Human Stain. Overall, this book doesn’t have quite the power or broad scope of American Pastoral. In some ways it feels more personal, as if it reflects Roth’s own life more intimately. The depiction of Nathan’s journey through adolescence feels lived – some at least of these reflections surely arise from Roth’s experiences as much as his alter-ego’s. Although Ira is the main focus, Zuckerman is very much central too, which isn’t really the case in American Pastoral. The young Nathan is an aspiring writer, allowing Roth to digress into his formative literary experiences, while the older Zuckerman is rather reclusive – an enigma left unsolved. It’s always dangerous to make direct links between fictional characters and their creators, but I think it’s probably safe to assume that the literary aspects of Nathan’s development at least are drawn from Roth’s own, and they are full of interest and insight. I came away from it wishing that Murray Ringold, or Zuckerman, or Roth, had been my English teacher. And I came away from the book wishing that Roth were here today to make sense for us of what has happened to bring America to its current state. This book goes some way to that, showing already the faultlines that have now become a gaping chasm into which the moderate centre seems to have fallen. A great writer, and an excellent book. It may not be The Great American Novel, but it’s certainly a great American novel.

Philippe Roth is one of my favorite contemporary writer, alas, recently passed away.

The headline instruction for review reads in Swedish “How was the item” The answer is “it was hurt as too often from Amazon”. The book is five stars.

Kindle buyers beware--shabby text processing has turned all the j's to l's, and considering the extent to which Roth writes about Jews in mid-20th century America, this is mighty distracting.

Da die Schwedische Nobelkommittee in diesem Jahr aus schwer verständlichen Ursachen beschlossen hat, den Nobelpreis in Literatur an den Liedermacher Bob Dylan zu vergeben, habe ich wieder angefangen, mein eigener Favorit für diesen Preis, Philip Roth, zu lesen. Ich habe seine Bücher lange nicht mehr gelesen, obwohl ich sie früher oft gern gelesen habe. So entdecke ich nun, dass seine späteren Werke auch Weltklasse sind, wie selbstverständlich. Seine schöne, flüssige, kreative Englische Sprache fesselt einen vom ersten Satz an. Ich entdecke nun seine „American Trilogy“, wo er die gegenwärtige Amerikanische Gesellschaft erstaunlich gut beschreibt. In dem Buch „I married a communist“ erzählt er zwar eine lange Geschichte über die McCarthy-Ära vergangener Tage, aber gleichzeitig, obwohl das Buch schon 1998 geschrieben ist, die Amerikanische Gesellschaft von heute, die den Donald Trump zum Präsidenten gewählt hat. Sehr zu empfehlen – und ich freue mich noch auf die anderen Bücher von Roth, die ich noch nicht gelesen habe!