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Title: I Married a Communist by Philip Roth ISBN: 0-375-70721-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (37 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Zuckerman Project II--A Superb New Novel
Comment: "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In many respects, the two most recent novels of Philip Roth represent a long meditation on Tolstoi's famous observation and suggest a common wellspring of the unhappy family narratives. Roth goes as far as to put Tolstoi's words into the mouth of Murray Ringold, the high school English teacher who taught Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, the virtues of "cri-ti-cal thinking" and who, near the end of his life some fifty years later, unfolds the fate of his brother Ira, the radio personality "Iron Rinn" and young Nathan's boyhood mentor. Forget what you have read about I Married a Communist as Roth's roman a clef payback for Claire Bloom's recent memoire of her difficult life with the novelist. It is much, much more and is of a thematic and emotional fabric with Roth's great American Pastoral. Roth's project, of which this is the second installment, now seems to be "Nathan Zuckerman's America," thickly textured stories of lives collectively deranged and rendered dysfunctional by America and its political demons, now the MacCarthy era, Red-hunting, and the blacklist. Along the way we have countless carefully observed digressions on, among other things, taxidermy, how to make "literature," New Jersey's geology, the power of "the word," the triumph of lowbrow, and (of course) Newark in the 'forties and 'fifties. One remains in awe of Roth's undiminished ability to mine his own experience, augmented by prodigious research, to turn out superb, universal novels like I Married a Communist. Is he our greatest novelist? Consider the oeuvre--Portnoy, The Zuckerman tetralogy (which includes the magical The Ghost Writer), The Counterlife, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, and now this--and compare his accomplishment to that of any living American writer. It isn't even close.
Rating: 5
Summary: Roth in his master mode
Comment: I Married a Communist is a brilliant novel, one of few recent novels I've read through nonstop for a long time. It combines pathos and humor in laying bare a variety of important topics:both the well-intentioned but foolish Marxism and the evil witch-hunting manias of the 1950s, anti-Semitism and the integration of Jews into American life, issues of betrayal and loss, the decline of Newark, the inspiration of a good teacher. Yes, it's partly autobiographical. But the betrayed hero, Ira Ringold, who represents Roth at least in part, is part admirable giant/ part obsessive creep.
The book is curious in having two levels of narration. The first is Roth's quasi-alter-ego the novelist Zuckerman, and in part this is Zuckerman's bildungsroman from the Newark classroom to the fantasies of international socialism to the University of Chicago. For Zuckerman Ira was an almost irresistible mentor, as was his brother, the teacher who inspired him to become a writer. That brother, Murray, is the second narrator, filling in Zuckerman on the parts of the story he missed, either because he was too young to understand at that time or because he separated from Ira and only heard of his end second-hand. The interplay between these two narrators, looking back over some 45 years is subtle and crafty, and the book easily moves from one consciousness to another. Murray in particular is a brlliant character: a Jewish war hero (WW II); a stimulating Socratic high school English teacher who makes Shakespeare live for his students; a union organizer who fights a witch hunt-based job dismissal and triumphs years later; a loving father, husband, and brother; and at the end a clear-minded 90-year old survivor. He feels betrayed by the teaching union he helpedestablish, betrayed by the failure of the city he grew up in.
Both narrators puzzle over the meteoric rise and unaccountable marriage of Ira to a famous radio actress, a beauty with a secret Jewish past. His betrayal of her is sexual. Her big betrayal is a ghost- written book with the same title as the novel, a denuncaition of her husband, who is a naive, forceful, sometimes bullying Marxist. The book catches wonderfully the feel of the 50s, from a moral, cultural, and political view.
All the major characters are given full, multi-dimensional characterization, even the wife. There's lot of humor, and lots of subtle reflection as well.
One other note: Dickens had London, Balzac had Paris, and Roth has North Jersey. This novel combined with American Pastoral paints a deep (and sad) landscape of Newark and its environs. The decline and fall of Roth's native Newark is a moving background to the main action of both books.
Rating: 4
Summary: Polemic, the 1950's and the loss of trust
Comment: My interest waxed and waned whilst reading this novel which I would describe as a novel of ideas rather than one driven by the interest one has in the fortune of the characters. I did not find it near as enthralling as American Pastoral. It is generally pretty coruscating about all the characters, their motives, delusions, illusions, - but some of its set pieces are rivetting stuff including Nathan's teacher Leo's defence of literature (p218) And the summation of the antagonism between communism (read "politics) and literature (p.223). Because it is a novel of ideas, that makes it to me, an example of what the novel is railing against - the absence of thought in media generally or as the narrator Uncle Murray tells Nathan "American unthinking that is now everywhere."(p284). Don't not read it.
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Title: American Pastoral by Philip Roth ISBN: 0375701427 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Human Stain : A Novel by PHILIP ROTH ISBN: 0375726349 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth ISBN: 0679772596 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 06 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Operation Shylock : A Confession (Vintage International) by Philip Roth ISBN: 0679750290 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Dying Animal by Philip Roth ISBN: 037571412X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 09 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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