I Married A Communist - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099288672 ISBN 13: 9780099288671

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold), an idealistic Communist and uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable. On his way to his political catastrophe, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress the exquisitely refined Eva Frame. Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to tears and treachery. And, with Eve's dramatic revelation to a gossip columnist of her husband's 'espionage' for the Soviet Union, the relationship becomes a national scandal. Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's disgrace is a story of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal and revenge; an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one - fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and deadly accurate.

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)

"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, insight and wit...a gripping novel" (New York Times Book Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0099288672
• ISBN 13: 9780099288671
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336