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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Five stars for intensity; three for critical thought.,
This review is from: I Married a Communist (Paperback)
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. This bit of literary back-getting is funny, in a repulsive way, but it raises a question which defines the novel and which the novel unfortunately fails to answer well. Roth has a real sense for his period, which most of us now associate with the blandness of popular culture at the time and not with the importance that higher culture attached to the moral power of literature. Middlebrows wanting access to higher culture were, if anything, even more fanatical than the Kazins and (Mary) McCarthys about the writer's duty of high-mindedness. It was the era that Lillian Hellman recalled for many in her memoirs and revivals of her plays, made plausible by her supposedly having been there as a neutral witness of integrity. After her death it was revealed that she had in fact been a Communist and had hidden the fact to avoid jail and enjoy the high lifestyle that somehow went both with the high mind and radical convictions in the literary world of the time. An excellent mimic, as always, Roth may also find that his own style--harsh, often unfair, never for the uninitiated--lends itself to the voice of the engage with no deep convictions, only rage. His feat is all the more impressive since the voice of Ira Ringold, a passionate but rather stupid man, is at odds with his own passionate but cynical voice and the voice of Ira's brother, Murray, through whom the story is told. Murray is the real common man, a decent Jewish schoolteacher with none of Ira's pretensions. The story ends with the sense of how cruelly Ira has betrayed Murray by speeding toward disaster--much, Roth might say, like the grandiose America Ira personifies (he was even an Abraham Lincoln impersonator). People are what matter, Roth says, not ideas. It is a startling message from a man whose fiction has often suffered from a callousness to real human beings as opposed to abstractions. If this is what Roth has learned from the failure of real-life relationships, it may have made him a much better writer. But to return to the literary-gossip theme: Roth's message may well be that the political fad du jour is not what matters, that the gossip mills grind everything down to triviality, that betrayal, not idealism, is the strongest human motive, and Francine Gray may as well have been a Nixonite. In this, he finally cheapens his own message, for there are differences. The blows to Roth's reputation were about what a public figure can expect in a culture addicted to trivial revelations (his point) but something much worse happened in the fifties when genuine idealism was perverted by Communists and anti-Communists into the equivalent of Roth versus Bloom and worse. Roth is old enough and wise enough to remember an age in which we were idealists. He seems now to have taken the counsel of a teacher in the novel who tells him that literature is the only ideal that will not betray him. But if one set of writers is like another, reducing all critical thought to gratuitous backstabbing, it reflects poorly on literature and on the supposed moral maturity of a culture that once venerated literature enough to consider writers dangerous. There may be a lot of truth in this, but Roth only scratches the surface. All the same, this may be the most moving novel Roth has ever written, not least because of the damaged faith it reveals in Roth's own commitment to literature. I defy anyone to read the closing paragraphs and remain unstirred. His writing is at its most spare and imaginative. It is high praise to say that in a novel whose bitterness recalls Thackeray, the music many readers may hear is Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."
34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Zuckerman Project II--A Superb New Novel,
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This review is from: I Married a Communist (Hardcover)
"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.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Roth in his master mode,
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This review is from: I Married a Communist (Paperback)
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. He feels betrayed by the teaching union he helpedestablish, betrayed by the failure of the city he grew up in. Both narrators puzzle over the meteoric rise and unaccountable marriage of Ira to a famous radio actress, a beauty with a secret Jewish past. His betrayal of her is sexual. Her big betrayal is a ghost- written book with the same title as the novel, a denuncaition of her husband, who is a naive, forceful, sometimes bullying Marxist. The book catches wonderfully the feel of the 50s, from a moral, cultural, and political view. All the major characters are given full, multi-dimensional characterization, even the wife. There's lot of humor, and lots of subtle reflection as well. One other note: Dickens had London, Balzac had Paris, and Roth has North Jersey. This novel combined with American Pastoral paints a deep (and sad) landscape of Newark and its environs. The decline and fall of Roth's native Newark is a moving background to the main action of both books.
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