I Married A Communist - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224052586 ISBN 13: 9780224052580

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1998

Synopsis

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 , an uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln lookalike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making this world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins.

On his way to his political catastrophe, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, the exquisitely refined Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll in a tasteful Manhattan townhouse to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And, with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Clifford 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 is narrated years later by his brother, Murray Ringold, whose former student, the adolescent Nathan Zuckerman, was the radio actor's adoring protege in the late forties.

(1998-07-17)

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 nineties 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:

I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, Roth remains on extraordinary form - wonderful storytelling and characterisation. (Erica Wagner Guardian, Books of the Year)

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or a word in its cracking velocity. (Philip Hensher Mail on Sunday)

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy. (Financial Times)

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)

Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago. (New York Review of Books)

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0224052586
• ISBN 13: 9780224052580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336