I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth

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Book Reviews of I Married a Communist

Book Review: Five stars for intensity; three for critical thought.
Summary: 4 Stars

This bit of literary back-getting is funny, in a repulsive way, but it raises a question which defines the novel and which the novel unfortunately fails to answer well. Roth has a real sense for his period, which most of us now associate with the blandness of popular culture at the time and not with the importance that higher culture attached to the moral power of literature. Middlebrows wanting access to higher culture were, if anything, even more fanatical than the Kazins and (Mary) McCarthys about the writer's duty of high-mindedness. It was the era that Lillian Hellman recalled for many in her memoirs and revivals of her plays, made plausible by her supposedly having been there as a neutral witness of integrity. After her death it was revealed that she had in fact been a Communist and had hidden the fact to avoid jail and enjoy the high lifestyle that somehow went both with the high mind and radical convictions in the literary world of the time. An excellent mimic, as always, Roth may also find that his own style--harsh, often unfair, never for the uninitiated--lends itself to the voice of the engage with no deep convictions, only rage. His feat is all the more impressive since the voice of Ira Ringold, a passionate but rather stupid man, is at odds with his own passionate but cynical voice and the voice of Ira's brother, Murray, through whom the story is told. Murray is the real common man, a decent Jewish schoolteacher with none of Ira's pretensions. The story ends with the sense of how cruelly Ira has betrayed Murray by speeding toward disaster--much, Roth might say, like the grandiose America Ira personifies (he was even an Abraham Lincoln impersonator).

People are what matter, Roth says, not ideas. It is a startling message from a man whose fiction has often suffered from a callousness to real human beings as opposed to abstractions. If this is what Roth has learned from the failure of real-life relationships, it may have made him a much better writer. But to return to the literary-gossip theme: Roth's message may well be that the political fad du jour is not what matters, that the gossip mills grind everything down to triviality, that betrayal, not idealism, is the strongest human motive, and Francine Gray may as well have been a Nixonite. In this, he finally cheapens his own message, for there are differences. The blows to Roth's reputation were about what a public figure can expect in a culture addicted to trivial revelations (his point) but something much worse happened in the fifties when genuine idealism was perverted by Communists and anti-Communists into the equivalent of Roth versus Bloom and worse. Roth is old enough and wise enough to remember an age in which we were idealists. He seems now to have taken the counsel of a teacher in the novel who tells him that literature is the only ideal that will not betray him. But if one set of writers is like another, reducing all critical thought to gratuitous backstabbing, it reflects poorly on literature and on the supposed moral maturity of a culture that once venerated literature enough to consider writers dangerous. There may be a lot of truth in this, but Roth only scratches the surface.

All the same, this may be the most moving novel Roth has ever written, not least because of the damaged faith it reveals in Roth's own commitment to literature. I defy anyone to read the closing paragraphs and remain unstirred. His writing is at its most spare and imaginative. It is high praise to say that in a novel whose bitterness recalls Thackeray, the music many readers may hear is Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."

Summary of I Married a Communist

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

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