I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth
(Houghton Mifflin, $26.00

Although the Modern Library has proved once and for all the absurdity of lists, I still can't control the urge to compile, to rate, in short, to make absurd little lists of my own. One such list-Indispensable Postwar Writers-is in constant flux, but no matter who comes and goes, up near the top, comfortably surveying the jockeying below, is Philip Roth. I will brook no dissent: no writer in the past thirty years has matched Roth's consistency, his output, his quality, or his ferocity with regard to art, and he just seems to be getting stronger. Having said that, I will acknowledge that Roth is not to everyone's taste-he can be scatological, crude, mean-spirited, over-sexed, philosophical, brilliant, lyrical, unpleasant, and uproariously funny all in one paragraph. He is the Rabelais of Newark, and his new novel, I Married a Communist, finds him at the height of his power. The book is a primer on the McCarthy era, a social and political history is a sweet package, and a neat trick to pull off. Unlike Bellow, whose social history often feels like a graduate seminar, Roth's frequent harangues never digress-they are symbiotic with character and plot, essential to the story.

And the story in I Married a Communist is really quite simple. It is a retelling, by his brother Murray and his one-time prot‚g‚ Nathan Zuckerman, of the fascinating and tragic life of Ira Ringold, aka Iron Rinn. Ira is a big (6'6"), brawling, anti-intellectual Jew out of Newark's turn of the century slums. He is a ditch-digger who jumps several social strata to become a popular and well-respected radio star. People in novels, however, just like people in life, never become successful without paying the piper. Ira's demise results from an unfortunate enthusiasm for communism and a disastrous marriage to a very unstable woman, a actress Eve Frame (who denies her Jewishness to the extent that Ira wears his as a badge).

That's it. That classic fictional arc: struggle, rise, fall. But what Roth does with it is something else again. For instance, anyone who has ever tried to write will be amazed at the complexity and success of the novel's structure. What you have, essentially, are three narratives that I visualize as concrete circles. The outside circle, the circle holding everything together, is Nathan's (old fans of Roth's will of course, bring much to his characterization). The middle circle, the real meat of the novel, belongs to Ira's brother Murray, and the epicenter, throbbing and threatening to explode, is Ira himself. All of these characters are telling the same story-contradicting, embellishing, stirring the pot, so to speak, so that what emerges seems almost three-dimensional, like a real life.

I suspect, in fact, it is (or was) a real life. Roth, it is no secret, has always mined his personal life for his fiction and it's best, as many have found out, not to cross him. This by way of an introduction to Ira's wife, Eve. Let's see-Eve is an actress, unstable, writes a nasty tell-all book about Ira, the book is initially lauded and then there is a strident backlash. Who could this Eve (Claire) Frame (Bloom) character be modeled after? I guess it will remain a mystery. I will say this: if Eve Frame is indeed Roth's retaliatory gesture toward Ms. Bloom, the war is over...he won. For Eve is terrifying, a sort of queen bee of hysteria and infantilism. She is not even, in the end, bright enough to bring down Ira. She is manipulated into it, coerced by a personal enemy of Ira's, and the book, mostly fabricated, is ghost-written to boot. If she weren't so scary, she'd be the funniest character in the book. No one, most of all Murray, can understand what Ira is doing with her in the first place. Here's Murray recounting a typical "episode": "She threw herself onto her knees in the middle of the floor and, oblivious to me-or maybe not all that oblivious-she cried, 'I beg of You! I implore you! Don't leave me!' The arms upthrust in the mink coat. The hands trembling in the air. And tears, as though it weren't a marriage at stake but the redemption of mankind. Confirming-if confirmation was necessary-that she absolutely repudiated being a rational human being. I remember thinking, Well, she's cooked her goose this time." She hasn't of course. Ira, relying always on a superlative stubbornness and bluster, thinks he can bulldoze any situation and he is sorely mistaken when it comes to Eve.

Which brings me to perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the story: the realistic evocation of the political destruction of an individual livelihood (and, indeed, life). Roth looks like a prophet here. In describing Ira's downfall, Roth takes us to a historical point and to an individual (Senator McCarthy, who wrote the book on paranoia and treachery) that perfectly and, almost dreamlike, echoes our current American political arena. This is where we are, folks. If you want to understand what is happening in Washington this very minute, let Ira Ringold and Joe McCarthy tell you. Which isn't to render the victims of such scape-goating blameless; it is merely to point our that we are happy spectators in the coliseum, enjoying another poor sap's pas de deux with the king of beasts. And we are, like we were then, way off base.

But perhaps it is not fair to boil Ira and our libido-rattled chief executive in the same pot. One of Roth's achievements in I Married a Communist is to accurately and compassionately describe the initial allure (both political and moral) of communism to this country's left and intelligentsia. These people felt strongly that they were working to make America better. No subversion. When it becomes clear that communism, like most systems, simply won't work, some survived and moved on, some didn't. If you happened to be in McCarthy's gunsights, it was quite literally too late. But the witch hunt, the mad mob, is not going to go away-it is, I'm afraid, too deeply ingrained in our imperfect social selves. The best we can hope for is perhaps a better understanding, a realization of our tendencies along with the requisite checks and balances. In this respect, I Married a Communist is a treatise masquerading as a pot-boiler-always a most effective ploy.

I will end this panegyric by mentioning what I probably should have stated up front: Philip Roth is an exquisite writer, a true artist. The emotion and the language never deviate. There is a clarity, eloquence, and style in nearly every sentence, whether narrated by an intellectual or a lug from the wrong side of the tracks. Here is Nathan, looking at the night sky and recalling that, as a child, his grandmother told him that when people die, they become stars:

"...There is just the furnace of Ira and the furnace of Eve burning at twenty million degrees...There is the furnace of Karl Marx and of Joseph Stalin and of Leon Trotsky and of Paul Robeson...There is the furnace of tailgunner Joe McCarthy. What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain...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."

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