Product Description

Radio actor Iron Rinn is a big Newark roughneck lighted 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 look-alike, he emerges from serving in WW2 passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins. I Married a Communist is the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace. It is also 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31221 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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
Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or a word in its crackling velocity - Mail on Sunday; A passionate and coruscating American tragedy - Financial Times; A gripping novel - NewYork Times Book Review

From the Publisher
'Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or a word in its cracking velocity' Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

Customer Reviews

Roth is a master
I thought this was a wonderful novel. It throws light on a subject not much understood (left-wing politics in the USA) but its key themes are those of betrayal and (typically for Roth) the difficulties in really understanding others and their motives. I found the ending almost breathtakingly beautiful. Roth is up there with Shakespeare in his ability to mix the sacred and profane. I doubt there is a better contemporary writer.

American beauty
Roth is an outstanding prose writer, and "I married a Communist" shows him at his best. Illustrating the conflicts of McCarthy-era American through the tale of pugnacious Communist Ira Ringold, Roth creates a panoply of interesting characters set in a powerful narrative with a slow-building, satisfying storyline.

One reservation: Roth is occasionally carried away by his own writing skill. Result: his otherwise excellent dialogue sometimes goes on at excessive length: the book would be more readable edited down by 30 pages.

Conclusion: excellent heavyweight literary fiction with a few dull patches.

Nathan again --- but with a slightly duller pencil
Let it first be said: Philip Roth is a genius. His writing is astounding, both for its gorgeous display of language and, just as important, for its truth of character and humanity corruption.

"I Married A Communist", the second in the author's trilogy about the huge political movements shaping post-WWII American history (Vietnam, McCarthyism and, with his latest, "The Human Stain", the Clinton era and p.c.-ness), is a very, very good book. However, "American Pastoral" it ain't.

In this second volume, Roth tells the story of Iron Rinn, a militantly naiive political figure of the post-war generation. The themes are typically Rothian: definitions of success, alienation, what it means to belong, what it means to separate. And, while the plot is fascinating and there are portions of the book that are written so magnificently you'll want to weep, there is a remote quality --- a third-person-ness and therefore an aloofness --- that detracts from the overall effectiveness.

Still, the book deserves four stars because it's part of the Roth canon. He's always worth reading and always astounding and delightful and depressing and devastating. Even when he's merely being a bit more mortal than we've come to expect of a writer with his gifts.