I Married a Communist: Philip Roth - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099287838 ISBN 13: 9780099287834

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

The second novel of Roth’s eloquent American trilogy, set in the tempestuous McCarthy era - a brilliant successor to American Pastoral

I Married a Communist charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, an American roughneck who begins life as a ditchdigger in 1930s New Jersey, becoming a big-time radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a zealous, bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's beloved leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expose that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'.

In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and savage revenge, anti-Communist fever pollutes national politics and infects the relationships of ordinary Americans; friends become deadly enemies, parents and children tragically estranged, lovers blacklisted and felled from vertiginous heights.

‘Quintessential Philip Roth’ Sunday Telegraph

About this title

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)

"One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails" (Xan Brooks Guardian)

"Quintessential Philip Roth" (Sunday Telegraph)

"A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology" (Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0099287838
• ISBN 13: 9780099287834
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352