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Summary
Summary
Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal. Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's political tribulations in the dark years of betrayal, the blacklist, and naming names. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth could write it.
Author Notes
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19, 1933. He attended Rutgers University for one year before transferring to Bucknell University where he completed a B.A. in English with highest honors in 1954. He received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1955.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, received the National Book Award in 1960. His other books include Letting Go, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life as a Man, The Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound, I Married a Communist, The Plot Against America, The Facts, The Anatomy Lesson, Exit Ghost, Deception, Nemesis, Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. He won the National Book Critic Circle Awards in 1987 for his novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for his memoir Patrimony: A True Story. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993 for Operation Shylock: A Confession and in 2001 for The Human Stain, the National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral. He stopped writing in 2010. He died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Disconcerting echoes of Roth's relationship with Claire Bloom, as revealed in her memoir, Leaving the Doll's House, haunt Roth's angry but oddly inert 23rd novel. As in American Pastoral, Roth again deals with the Newark of his youth, and with the sons of Jewish immigrants to whom America has given opportunity and even richesand how they are swept off course by the forces of history. Roth's old alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, narrates the story of Ira Ringold, aka Iron Rinn, a supremely idealistic political radical and celebrated radio star of the 1950s who is blacklisted and brought to ruin when his wife, Eva Frame (a self-hating Jewish actress born Chava Fromkin), writes an expose called I Married A Communist. The impetus for Eva's treacherous act is Ira's insistence that she evict her 24-year-old daughter from their house; the resemblance to Bloom's revelations of Roth's similar demand is too close to miss, and Roth's shrill belaboring of the issue seems a thinly disguised vendetta. Even high-pitched scenes of family conflict don't bring the novel to life. One problem is that the flat flashback narration shared between the 64-year-old Nathan and Ira's 90-year-old brother, Murray, is stultifyingly dull. Some fine Roth touches do appear: his evocation of the Depression years through the McCarthy era has clarity and vigor. But Ira's aggressively boorish behavior as he struggles with his conscience over having abandoned his Marxist ideals to assume a bourgeois lifestyle is never credible, and his turgid ideological rants against the American government are jackhammers of repetitious invective. In addition, the depiction of an adolescent Nathan as a precocious writer and social philosopher and the saintly Murray's infallible memory of long conversations with Iraeven between Ira and Eva in bedchallenge the reader's credulity. For those who lived through the years Roth evokes, this novel will have some resonance. For others, its belligerent tone and lack of dramatic urgency will be a turn-off. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The famous radio performer Ira Ringold was a Communist, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that was a hazardous card to carry, given all the Red-baiting going on in Washington. Ira's wife, a radio personality herself and a former silent-film star, revealed his sympathies in an expose , I Married a Communist, and destroyed him. Long after Ira's death, narrator Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego reprised from earlier novels) learns from his high-school teacher, Murray Ringold, Ira's brother, all the details of Ira's rise and fall. Although Nathan had been well acquainted with Ira back in his prime, and certainly had been introduced to his radical politics, Nathan was not aware of Ira's membership in the party. In fact, Nathan did not know that the real reason for the rejection of his Fulbright application was because of his friendship with Ira, then under surveillance by the FBI. Only later, in discussions with Murray, does Nathan find all this out--and, privy to Murray's and Nathan's conversations, so does the reader. Roth luxuriates in wordplay and circuitous storytelling, but his beautiful prose exquisitely achieves his purpose of illuminating every fiber of the fascinating Ira as well as of the social and political atmosphere of the post^-World War period. The result is a deft, trenchant novel. --Brad Hooper
Kirkus Review
Following the spectacular success of its immediate predecessor, American Pastoral (1997), Roth's ambitious new novel is another chronicle of innocence and idealism traducedthe demolition of what one of its characters calls ``the myth of your own goodness.'' That character is Murray Ringold, a nonagenarian former schoolteacher whose meeting with his onetime student (and recurring Roth character), novelist Nathan Zuckermano, triggers a complex reconstruction of the infamous life of Murray's younger brother Ira. As Iron Rinn, a radio star. . . married to one of the country's most revered radio actresses, Ira had become a beloved public figure renowned for his impersonations of Abraham Lincoln (whom he physically resembled) and for patriotic broadcasts celebrating America's working poor. Nathan, who grew up in the 1940s as a fledgling liberal intellectual whose heroes were radio playwright Norman Corwin and left-wing novelist Howard Fast, adored the charismatic Ira, even after the latter's wife denounced him as a duplicitous ``zealot'' in her explosive memoir, I Married a Communist. The story of Ira's violent youth, spectacular career, and eventual disgrace is rather ham-fistedly assembled from Nathan's own memories (as Iron Rinn's devoted acolyte), the stories Ira told him, andmost movinglythe immensely detailed recollections poured forth by the ever-garrulous Murray Ringold (brilliantly portrayed as a bundle of fiery intellectual and moral energies undimmed by old age; a sturdy exemplar of ``the disciplined sadness of stoicism). The character of Murray is the triumph of this often inventive but gratingly discursive novel, whose dramatic content is frequently upstaged by such indulgences as Ira's lengthy political diatribes, Nathan's summaries of favorite literary works (such as Arthur Miller's Focus), and Murray's exhausting (if agreeably savage) remembrance of Richard Nixon's state funeral. Despite its superb re-creation of the conflicted 1940s and the ordeal of the American Left, along with a plethora of sharply realized ideologues at verbal war, this very talky book is an example of Roth at his most forceful and eloquent, though perhaps rather less than his best.(First printing of 150,000; $150,000 ad/promo)
Library Journal Review
It is the McCarthy era, and Iron Rinn, star of the popular radio show The Free and the Brave, is married to glamorous film actress Eve Frame (reputedly born Chava Frumkin in Brooklyn). He's also the brother of Nathan Zuckerman's high school English teacher, Murray Ringold, and a committed Communist. Reminiscing with Murray, Nathan recalls his youthful involvement with Iron, slowly uncovering the source of Iron's beliefs, his dark rages, and the collapse of his marriage, which ends with Eve's publishing the seriously damaging exposé I Married a Communist. Occasionally, Roth's tone is hectoringwe feel that we are getting a history lesson from, well, a high school teacherbut he also tells a riveting story, and the writing is more heartfelt, less guarded and cynical, than one might expect. In fact, Roth seems to have drawn on his own marital woes when writing this novel. Remember Claire Bloom complaining in Leaving a Doll's House that Roth insisted she throw her daughter out of the house? Iron asks the same of Eve, whose daughter (a monster here) wrecks their marriage. And Nathan pointedly observes, "People don't like seeing exposés on the best sellers list that falsely denounce them." The murderous secret revealed at the end comes as a good surprise. For all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/98.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Ira Ringold's brother, Murray, discusses Ira's tortuous marriage: There were nights I couldn't sleep. I'd say to [my wife] Doris, `Why doesn't he leave? Why can't he leave?' And do you know what Doris would answer? `Because he's like everybody--you only realize things when they're over. Why don't you leave me? All the human stuff that makes it hard for anybody to be with anybody else--don't we have it? We have arguments. We have disagreements. We have what everybody has--the little this and the little that, the little insults that pile up, the little temptations that pile up. Don't you think I know that there are women who are attracted to you? Teachers at school, women in the union, powerfully attracted to my husband? Don't you think I know you had a year, after you got back from the war, when you didn't know why you were still with me, when you asked yourself every day, Why don't I leave her? But you didn't. Because by and large people don't. Everyone's dissatisfied, but by and large not leaving is what people do. Especially people who've been left themselves, like you and your brother. Come through what you two came through and you value stability very highly. Probably overvalue it. 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. Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit." Murray Ringold on betrayal: All those antagonisms, Murray said, and then the torrent of betrayal. Every soul its own betrayal factory. For whatever reason: survival, excitement, advancement, idealism. For the sake of the damage that can be done, the pain that can be inflicted. For the cruelty in it. For the pleasure in it. The pleasure of manifesting one's latent power. The pleasure of dominating others, of destroying people who are your enemies. You're surprising them. Isn't that the pleasure of betrayal? The pleasure of tricking somebody. It's a way to pay people back for a feeling of inferiority they arouse in you, of being put down by them, a feeling of frustration in your relationship with them. Their very existence may be humiliating to you, either because you aren't what they are or because they aren't what you are. And so you give them their comeuppance.Of course there are those who betray because they have no choice. I read a book by a Russian scientist who, in the Stalin years, betrayed his best friend to the secret police. He was under heavy interrogation, terrible physical torture for six months--at which point he said, `Look, I cannot resist any longer, so please tell me what you want. Whatever you give me I will sign.' He signed whatever they wanted him to sign. He was himself sentenced to life in prison. Without parole. After fourteen years, in the sixties, when things changed, he was released and he wrote this book. He says that he betrayed his best friend for two reasons: because Excerpted from I Married a Communist by Philip Roth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
