From Powells.com
With respect to American literature, the nineties belonged to Philip Roth. Aside from the remarkable accomplishment of producing a major literary work every other year, Roth's first four novels of the decade constituted a literary grand slam, receiving, in turn, the four major American literary awards: Patrimony, the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography/Autobiography; Operation Shylock, the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award; Sabbath's Theater, the 1995 National Book Award; and American Pastoral, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. But even though the literary establishment could not have devised a more clear seal of approval, Roth remains (ever since his 1969 satiric masterpiece, Portnoy's Complaint, caused many Jews to declare Roth a Jewish anti-Semite) one of our most controversial novelists. In I Married a Communist Roth has again managed to trip up his would be admirers. Is this story of a famous actress who publicly denounces her husband in order to destroy his reputation a cheap, thinly-veiled revenge novel, as many claimed? Roth's own wife, actress Claire Bloom, painted a decidedly anti-pastel portrait of their 18-year marriage in her memoir Leaving a Doll's House. Or is I Married a Communist a skillful and insightful portrait of that period in American history most commonly defined against the hysterical obsessions of Joseph McCarthy? The answer is, of course, both, which in this case only increases the novel's interest. While brilliantly exposing the complex roles both innocence and obsession have played in our national history, Roth (inadvertently?) reveals something of the role these have played in his own life. Is this cheap cowardice or courageous honesty? Either way, I Married a Communist is a major installment from a brilliant novelist clearly at the top of his form. Farley, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.
In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."
In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century—has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.
Review
"This powerful novel leaves me haunted by the isolation in which each character, not just Ira, stands in history. The book's final page tells of the stars, whose brilliance is matched only by their apartness. A classic image to close this new novel by one of the real ones." Robert Kelly, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature)." The Village Voice Literary Supplement
Review
"His latest novel is a bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past...What I Married a Communist tells us above all is that Philip Roth is very much with us as a writer, every bit as contemporary and vital as he was when he began...Philip Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was 40 yeares ago." Robert Stone,
New York Review of Books
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
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, 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 can conceive one--fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and politically accurate.
Synopsis
Roth's novel, set during the 1950s Communist witch hunt, is about a woman who writes a bitter book about her former husband and seems to be, at least partly, based on his own troubled relationship with Claire Bloom. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.