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"Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he is plunged through the cracks of reality into a world of shadows and darkness—the Neverwhere. Learn more | See related books
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Product Details
Paperback: 323 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International Edition edition (November 2, 1999)
This slim, dense novel of an ugly period in American history would most certainly have been overlooked but for two things: Philip Roth's name on the cover, and Claire Bloom's bitter memoir of her divorce from Roth. There is only one way to say it: yes, this novel plays a chillingly mean game of So There Claire, and yes, that is what keeps you turning the pages, at least on the first reading. Having said this, it is time to give Roth credit for having written a far more complex novel than alleged by his detractors on this score. The Roth-Bloom story is not, in fact, transplanted wholesale into a time when gossip-mongering really did have the power of life and death. Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is in his late teens and flirting with radical politics before going away to college; his idol is the book's protagonist, Ira Ringold, a man quite unlike Roth; and it is Ringold who marries the Claire Bloom figure, "Eve Frame." To be quite fair, most of what is revealed about the Ringold-Frame marriage could have been inferred from Bloom's own words. And given the number she did on Roth, Bloom gets off lightly as far as her character goes: she is said to be vain, petty, and histrionic. No big surprise. Roth's bile is reserved for "Eve Frame's" monstrous daughter (whether true or not, an unforgettable portrait) and, interestingly, for "Katrina Van Tassel Grant," the actress's monstrous best friend. In reality, "Katrina" was probably Francine du Plessix Gray, Bloom's best friend, a writer and journalist well known for her damning early reports on Richard Nixon. Gray would have to be a poor sport not to laugh a bit on finding herself portrayed as a fanatic anti-Communist and, later, a mourner at Nixon's funeral.Read more ›
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38 of 44 people found the following review helpful
"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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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
I Married a Communist is a brilliant novel, one of few recent novels I've read through nonstop for a long time. It combines pathos and humor in laying bare a variety of important topics:both the well-intentioned but foolish Marxism and the evil witch-hunting manias of the 1950s, anti-Semitism and the integration of Jews into American life, issues of betrayal and loss, the decline of Newark, the inspiration of a good teacher. Yes, it's partly autobiographical. But the betrayed hero, Ira Ringold, who represents Roth at least in part, is part admirable giant/ part obsessive creep. The book is curious in having two levels of narration. The first is Roth's quasi-alter-ego the novelist Zuckerman, and in part this is Zuckerman's bildungsroman from the Newark classroom to the fantasies of international socialism to the University of Chicago. For Zuckerman Ira was an almost irresistible mentor, as was his brother, the teacher who inspired him to become a writer. That brother, Murray, is the second narrator, filling in Zuckerman on the parts of the story he missed, either because he was too young to understand at that time or because he separated from Ira and only heard of his end second-hand. The interplay between these two narrators, looking back over some 45 years is subtle and crafty, and the book easily moves from one consciousness to another. Murray in particular is a brlliant character: a Jewish war hero (WW II); a stimulating Socratic high school English teacher who makes Shakespeare live for his students; a union organizer who fights a witch hunt-based job dismissal and triumphs years later; a loving father, husband, and brother; and at the end a clear-minded 90-year old survivor.Read more ›
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