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

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers the astonishing story of the rise and fall of an American man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s. "Gripping.... A masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit." — The New York Times Book Review I Married a Communist is the story of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt. In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow." In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century”—has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.

Review: "A Catastrophe for Everybody" - 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.
Review: Wonderful writing, deeply philosophical but also fairly depressing - Wonderful writing,deeply philosophical but also fairly depressing.Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors,however.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #335,126 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #306 in Censorship & Politics #2,652 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction #9,533 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,116 Reviews |

## Images

![I Married a Communist: American Trilogy (2) (Vintage International) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71ZFwEt3wZL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A Catastrophe for Everybody"
*by B***N on May 7, 2021*

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
*by T***Y on December 13, 2016*

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

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Zuckerman Project II--A Superb New Novel
*by P***O on January 1, 1999*

"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.

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*Last updated: 2026-05-21*