I Married a Communist

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Review ------ Ira Ringold (now Iron Rinn) is a self-educated radio actor married to spoilt, rags-to-riches beauty and silent-film star, Eve Frame. He is a Communist, she is passionately and irrationally anti-Semitic (in spite of her own Jewish origins). Roth's alter-ego narrator Nathan Zuckerman--an idealistic admirer of Ira as a boy-- uncovers the story of Eve's betrayal of Ira to a gossip- columnist, and Nathan's own unknowing involvement with the blacklistings and ruined careers of the immediate post-war period. Roth's characteristically acerbic writing and keen eye for emotional detail reaches to the heart of this moment of high American tragedy, a point at which the American dream was damaged beyond recovery. The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch- hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time. --Lisa Jardine Review ------ "A passionate and coruscating American tragedy" (Financial Times) "Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity" (Mail on Sunday) "Quintessential Philip Roth" (Sunday Telegraph) "A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology" (Observer) "Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, in and wit...a gripping novel" (New York Times Book Review)