A book review of Philip Roth's latest novel,
I married a communist*** by Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 1998 In his 23rd novel, Philip Roth continues his depiction of postwar America begun in his highly acclaimed American Pastoral. I Married a Communist opens up another dark chapter in recent American history: the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era. Roth’s longtime alter ego Nathan Zuckerman and his former high school teacher Murray Ringold are our guides, reflecting on this troubled period. In a series of long conversations, the 90-year-old Ringold reconstructs the complex and ultimately tragic life of his younger brother Ira, who was Nathan’s idolized mentor in the forties. Ira Ringold, a self-educated one-time hobo, ditch digger, zinc miner and factory worker has apparently made it when he turns from Abraham Lincoln-impersonator at the local high school into the popular radio actor Iron Rinn and marries the beautiful silent film star Eve Frame. But even as he himself becomes a star, Ira remains a Communist radical, celebrating the proletariat in his radio plays and spouting Marxist beliefs at dinner parties. That Communism is Ira’s ultimate stumbling block seems both accidental and inevitable. Ira and Eve are troubled souls who cling to each other with a desperation that eventually leads to disaster. When Eve discovers Ira’s infidelity and realizes that her marriage to him, her fourth, has failed, she turns against him with the rage of the betrayed. Hitting him in his weakest spot, she exposes him as a conspiring Communist spy in her gossipy memoir I Married a Communist. The book and the witch hunt that ensue not only destroy the careers of Ira and his associates (including his brother Murray), but also his idealistic faith in mankind. In a painful process he must learn that even supposedly loyal friends have betrayed him. Worse still, his Communist mentor Johnny O’Day, “a militant who was only and always true,” calls Ira a traitor to his revolutionary comrades and the working class. Roth’s novel is less a politically charged story than a superb psychological study. Roth paints the picture of a man who believed he could have it all – career, wife, family and his place in the Communist class struggle – but loses everything. Through the eyes of the wise and witty Murray he tells a deeply moving story of Red-baiting and blacklisting, but also a grand tale of idealism and disillusionment, betrayal and revenge.