Spoiler

What happens when people die, my mother explained, is that they go up to the sky and live on forever as gleaming stars. I searched the sky and said, "Is he that one?" and she said yes, and we went back inside and I fell asleep.

That explanation made sense then and, of all things, it made sense again on the night when, wide awake from the stimulus of all that narrative engorgement, I lay out of doors till dawn, thinking that Ira was dead, that Eve was dead, that with the exception perhaps of Sylphid off in her villa on the French Riviera, a rich old woman of seventy-two, all the people with a role in Murray's account of the Iron Man's unmaking were now no longer impaled on their moment but dead and free of the traps set for them by their era. Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. [...] What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain on a night as splendidly clear as that night Murray left me for good -- for the best of loyal brothers, the ace of English teachers, died in Phoenix two months later - is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.

The stars are indispensable.

And bang, Roth's 19th novel ends. A novel about McCarthyism, the relation between ideology and personhood, sentimental, political and literary education, American-Jewish life, ascetic isolation vs. living-in-relation, step-daughters, the language of Shax's great tragedies or adolescent polemic, and revenge. A novel wherein, some third of the way through and in the most Roth of ways, these great thematics and motifs unfurl to reveal a seething, broiling misogyny. One reviewer called it 'an angry, bitter, resentful mess by a man who might have taken another course,' and it's hard to read away from that. Those final lines vaunting 'the colossal spectacle of no antagonism' reinstate this angle just as we depart from the primary plot; remind us that one thing the framing narrator, Nathan, wants away from is human error and human antagonism. And here at the end, all of human embroilment - of ideology, of sex, of interpersonal complexity - fades. First to the beauty of literary production, as Nathan recalls Murray reading to their class from Macbeth, and then finally to the stars themselves.

I Married a Communist enfolds each narrative account of its protagonist Ira with the possibility of alternative accounts. Nathan's memory of Ira is counterpoised with the detailed history Murray offers from his vantage point as Ira's brother, and with Eve's distorted, publicised account of her marriage to him. These various narratives are themselves constantly mediated through retelling. Ira's firsthand accounts, told once to Murray, are recollected and retold by that 'ace of [...] teachers' to Nathan, who narrates them for the novel's audience. In this manner, the novel might initially appear to trace a Penrose triangle about this man. Ira: a man of unending sides, viewed askance by everyone and, thus, a figure who might stand in for all people; each of us with our complexity. He might even represent, say, Roth, for instance. Ira as the witch-hunted, misrepresented, much-maligned boy from Newark grown into the artistic, bourgeois milieu of Manhattan. Ira as Roth, and Roth as that much maligned man, taking refuge away from chattering society.

Yet the novel presents a certainty about Ira's narrative. An unglamorous certainty, of course. The final revelations about Ira's history and personhood are ones of comprehensible ugliness merging into bellicose brutality. Yet, in this, they become even firmer and more definite. This, which Murray discloses to Nathan, is a final truth. Any possibility of its being a deception foreclosed by how grimly it portrays Ira's ore. There is no questioning by Nathan, by Murray nor by any other framing narrator or device of whether their accounts are wrong, skewed or partial. They are too busy militating against Eve's perspective; narrating her into the despicable role. Roth went so far as to name her Eve Frame. Her name gestures at fictional devices, narrative skews, carefully presented selections of images; at the idea of her life and her stories as like pictures or paintings, framed and hung for consumption. No accident that this is the story and character Roth chose to write following his ex-wife Claire Bloom's publication of her a memoir describing Roth as vain and resentful towards her daughter.

Spoiler

Eve, like Claire, is a Jewish actress. She too takes a financier for a second husband. The both of them have musicians for daughters (Bloom's daughter an opera singer, where Sylphid in the novel is an harpist); daughters who both Roth and Ira demanded move out. And, where the novel features Ira having a consensual affair with his step-daughter's best friend that she then misrepresents for her own gain, Bloom alleges in her memoir, Leaving a Doll's House that Roth came onto her own daughter's best friend.

Dragged from grace by Roth's plotting, Eve (née Claire Bloom) is presented as foolish, self-hating, self-deceiving, pathetic and superficial. The putative complexity of the enfolded narratives, with their puff pastry intricacy, ultimately produce a mean serve of a novel. Ira might be no good but at least he lives in the fullness of his contradictions. All those folds upon folds in service of rendering him as multi-dimensional as possible, positioning him as sorely multifaceted. Thrust to the side, Eve is instead relegated to the roles of shrieking harridan, simpering fool, society naif. Whatever the exquisiteness of Roth's prose and scope of his vision, when you deep what he's doing, his motivating bile is inescapable.

Every Philip Roth book I read becomes my new favorite book

Nathan Zuckerman’s tenderness for the male figures permeating his life hits a place in my heart that no other narrator can.

Mutually assured destruction told by the most constructive English teacher I’ve ever witnessed.

This is my third Philip Roth book, and it seems I'm reading his Nathan Zuckerman historical trilogy in reverse order (having started with [b:The Human Stain|11734|The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)|Philip Roth|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1308953496s/11734.jpg|1118624] about ten years ago). Considering just how much this book is consumed with what it means to be a "man" in America, it's odd that I chose this book right after reading [a:Carol Shields|12034|Carol Shields|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1240080700p2/12034.jpg]' [b:Unless|74462|Unless|Carol Shields|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327970989s/74462.jpg|1344971] – almost the polar opposite. I enjoyed both, though I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would, or as much as the esteemed writers of Esquire would have had me believe. There are plenty of great thoughts, and great quotable lines, my favorite being...

"Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about."

It's not too surprising to read that there are some characters and plot lines in I Married a Communist that seem to come directly from Roth's own life. Now I just have to decide whether to read American Pastoral, or just wait until Ewan McGregor directs the film

Downfall...

This is the story of Ira Ringold, a Jew from Newark who becomes a big star on radio and then is destroyed in the period of the McCarthy witch-hunts. This is the story of a failed marriage; of toxic family relationships; of male adolescence and male role models and masculinity; of morality and its lack; of ageing; of literature; of anti-Semitism; of politics; of fanaticism; of hypocrisy; of betrayal. This is the story of a particular America in a particular time and place; a story that presages the America of today.

I Married a Communist is the second volume of what is known as Roth’s American Trilogy, preceded by American Pastoral, which I declared to be The Great American Novel, and followed by The Human Stain. They are not a trilogy in the sense that the word tends to be used today – each of these stands complete on its own, connected only in the sense that the three together are Roth’s attempt to make sense of America at the end of the 20th century by looking back over the decades of the mid-century. In each the story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a barely disguised alter-ego of Roth himself.

When Murray Ringold, once Nathan’s English teacher and later friend, and now an old man, attends a summer school at the university where Zuckerman, himself now a man in his 60s, teaches, they spend the evenings together, and over the course of the week Murray tells Zuckerman the story of his younger brother, Ira. Nathan knew Ira too once, when Nathan was young and impressionable and Ira was at his peak as a star and as a man. Ira was a formative influence on the young boy, a second father figure, and for a time he was the most important person in Nathan’s life. But as Nathan grew up he grew away from Ira, so although he knew in broad outline what had happened to him, this is the first time he has heard Ira’s later story in detail. As Murray fills in the gaps of Ira’s earlier and later life, Zuckerman also tells the reader of the man he knew, looking back with the eyes of age and experience and reassessing his youthful judgement of the man.

The story is simple and we are told near the beginning how Ira’s downfall came about. At the height of his stardom he married Eve Frame, once a Hollywood starlet and now also a radio star. The marriage was disastrous, for which Ira placed the blame squarely on Eve’s grown-up daughter Sylphid and on Eve’s weakness in letting Sylphid domineer over her. Eve may have felt that Ira’s penchant for infidelity had something to do with it, though. When Ira leaves her, Eve publishes a memoir of their marriage in which she claims he is a communist taking orders from the Kremlin and betraying America. In the McCarthy era, this accusation alone is enough to destroy Ira’s career. Part of what Murray will tell Nathan is how Ira reacted to his downfall and how the rest of his life played out.

But the story is to a large extent a vehicle for Zuckerman/Roth to dissect the various characters and the wider society. The question is not whether Ira was a communist – we know that he was – but why. He too, as Nathan with him, was influenced by an older man that he loved as a friend and mentor. But there’s a feeling that to him being a communist was an ego thing – something that separated him from the common herd, that allowed him to feel superior. Yes, he cared about those in society who were disadvantaged, but he also enjoyed the luxury and celebrity that came with his marriage to Eve even as he ranted against her and her friends. Nathan’s outgrowing of him is beautifully observed – as Nathan matures and goes off to college where he spends time with really educated and intelligent men, Ira diminishes in his eyes. Perhaps Ira’s tragedy is that he never outgrew his own mentor.

It has been claimed that Ira’s marriage to Eve is based on Roth’s own failed marriage to Claire Bloom, and that the book is a vicious response to Bloom’s memoirs in which she painted an unflattering picture of Roth. This may be so, but I don’t think it matters – it works at a literary level and in truth the reader – this reader, anyway – sympathises slightly more with Eve than with Ira, although both are weak and selfish. Through Eve, Roth goes into the question of Jewish self-hate – anti-Semitism practised by Jews themselves. I found this aspect fascinating – it was something I’d never considered before. Roth shows how this is a response to society’s anti-Semitism, where some Jews find it easier to try to hide their identity and join in rather than spend a lifetime battling prejudice. It made me think of African Americans “passing”, which in fact is the subject of The Human Stain.

Overall, this book doesn’t have quite the power or broad scope of American Pastoral. In some ways it feels more personal, as if it reflects Roth’s own life more intimately. The depiction of Nathan’s journey through adolescence feels lived – some at least of these reflections surely arise from Roth’s experiences as much as his alter-ego’s. Although Ira is the main focus, Zuckerman is very much central too, which isn’t really the case in American Pastoral. The young Nathan is an aspiring writer, allowing Roth to digress into his formative literary experiences, while the older Zuckerman is rather reclusive – an enigma left unsolved. It’s always dangerous to make direct links between fictional characters and their creators, but I think it’s probably safe to assume that the literary aspects of Nathan’s development at least are drawn from Roth’s own, and they are full of interest and insight. I came away from it wishing that Murray Ringold, or Zuckerman, or Roth, had been my English teacher.

And I came away from the book wishing that Roth were here today to make sense for us of what has happened to bring America to its current state. This book goes some way to that, showing already the faultlines that have now become a gaping chasm into which the moderate centre seems to have fallen. A great writer, and an excellent book. It may not be The Great American Novel, but it’s certainly a great American novel.

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this was one of the last books my gram read before she died a few years back, and this book was difficult for me to read and finish...i felt disconnected from the narration, perhaps because i was not looking for an emotional investment. it was a good roth book, but not my favorite. and that is really all i want to say about it.

Really enjoying the American trilogy, already looking for the third book.

There's a quote in this book contrasting politics ("the great generalizer") with literature ("the particularizer") and while this book has a great many memorable characters in it, the overall feel is that these particular fabrications run dangerously close to serving as pawns in a generalized, polemical debate. Roth gives us Ira Ringold firmly planted in the McCarthy era to explore so much through a deeply flawed character, but much of it is told secondhand in ways where other characters heavily summarize, armchair psychoanalyze, and explain Ira to the reader.

Roth does a wonderful job of capturing and rooting a particular time and place in American history. And a three-star Roth is pretty much a 4-star anybody-else, but given my fondness for the other two books in this trilogy, this one felt a bit too pedantic.
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