I Married a Communist

I Married a Communist

In an eloquent novel set against the turbulent backdrop of the McCarthy era, radio actor Iron Rinn, an idealistic Communist, marries beautiful actress Eva Frame, but their private relationship becomes a national scandal when Eva publicly betrays her husband's politics to a gossip columnist. 150,000 first printing. Iron Rinn (né Ira Ringold) is a self-educated radio actor, married to a spoilt, rags-to-riches beauty, silent-film star Eve Frame (née Chave Fromkin). He is a Communist, and a "sucker for suffering," locked into the cycle of violence from which he has emerged. She has risen by assiduous imitation of what is "classy"--which seems to include a wide swathe of anti-Semitism--and ultimately denounces her husband as a Soviet spook. And who would be the narrator of this McCarthy-era meltdown? None other than Philip Roth's longtime alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who learns the full tragedy several decades later, owing to a chance encounter with Ira's brother: "I'm the only person living who knows Ira's story," 90-year-old Murray Ringold tells Nathan, "you're the only person still living who cares about it." Characteristically, Nathan also discovers that his own story was bound up with the blacklistings and ruined careers of the immediate postwar period. It seems that he had been tainted by his association with the Ringolds--Murray was in fact his high-school teacher--and was denied the Fulbright scholarship he deserved. "They had you down for Ira's nephew," Murray tells Nathan. "The FBI didn't always get everything right." Roth's acerbic style and keen eye for emotional detail goes to the heart of this moment of high tragedy in which the American dream was damaged beyond repair. --Lisa Jardine It is the McCarthy era, and Iron Rinn, star of the popular radio show The Free and the Brave, is married to glamorous film actress Eve Frame (reputedly born Chava Frumkin in Brooklyn). He's also the brother of Nathan Zuckerman's high school English teacher, Murray Ringold, and a committed Communist. Reminiscing with Murray, Nathan recalls his youthful involvement with Iron, slowly uncovering the source of Iron's beliefs, his dark rages, and the collapse of his marriage, which ends with Eve's publishing the seriously damaging expose I Married a Communist. Occasionally, Roth's tone is hectoring?we feel that we are getting a history lesson from, well, a high school teacher?but he also tells a riveting story, and the writing is more heartfelt, less guarded and cynical, than one might expect. In fact, Roth seems to have drawn on his own marital woes when writing this novel. Remember Claire Bloom complaining in Leaving a Doll's House that Roth insisted she throw her daughter out of the house? Iron asks the same of Eve, whose daughter (a monster here) wrecks their marriage. And Nathan pointedly observes, "People don't like seeing exposes on the best sellers list that falsely denounce them." The murderous secret revealed at the end comes as a good surprise. For all collections. -?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. The famous radio performer Ira Ringold was a Communist, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that was a hazardous card to carry, given all the Red-baiting going on in Washington. Ira's wife, a radio personality herself and a former silent-film star, revealed his sympathies in an expose , I Married a Communist , and destroyed him. Long after Ira's death, narrator Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego reprised from earlier novels) learns from his high-school teacher, Murray Ringold, Ira's brother, all the details of Ira's rise and fall. Although Nathan had been well acquainted with Ira back in his prime, and certainly had been introduced to his radical politics, Nathan was not aware of Ira's membership in the party. In fact, Nathan did not know that the real reason for the rejection of his Fulbright application was because of his friendship with Ira, then under surveillance by the FBI. Only later, in discussions with Murray, does Nathan find all this out--and, privy to Murray's and Nathan's conversations, so does the reader. Roth luxuriates in wordplay and circuitous storytelling, but his beautiful prose exquisitely achieves his purpose of illuminating every fiber of the fascinating Ira as well as of the social and political atmosphere of the post^-World War period. The result is a deft, trenchant novel. Brad Hooper Following the spectacular success of its immediate predecessor, American Pastoral (1997), Roth's ambitious new novel is another chronicle of innocence and idealism traducedthe demolition of what one of its characters calls ``the myth of your own goodness.'' That character is Murray Ringold, a nonagenarian former schoolteacher whose meeting with his onetime student (and recurring Roth character), novelist Nathan Zuckermano, triggers a complex reconstruction of the infamous life of Murray's younger brother Ira. As Iron Rinn, a radio star. . . married to on