Better Red?

By Paul Gray

A Jewish man from Newark, N.J., achieves worldly success and happiness only to have his life ruined by his deranged daughter. That is the central story of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), which earlier this year was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Now comes Roth's I Married a Communist (Houghton Mifflin; 323 pages; $26), which portrays a Jewish man from Newark, N.J., who achieves worldly success and happiness, only to have his life ruined by a deranged stepdaughter. Anyone who thinks these two plots are too similar to justify separate novels probably has not been paying attention to Roth's career. He has spun whole cycles of fiction around the same, or very similar, characters trying to cope with the unvarying problems of their lives. Repetitive stress is Roth's grand comic theme; his genius shows up in the variations.

American Pastoral portrayed the impact on a single family of public events during the turbulent 1960s. I Married a Communist sets the calendar back to the late '40s and early '50s, the era of Red baiting and McCarthyism in the U.S., when communists, actual or accused, were hounded into disgrace and unemployment or jail. One of them, according to Roth's novel, was Iron Rinn, ne Ira Ringold, a gangly (6-ft. 6-in.) son of Newark who had circuitously risen, after his military service during World War II, to become a prominent radio actor in Manhattan. Ira's new fame brings rewards. He marries Eve Frame, a one-time star of silent films, then Broadway and now radio, and moves into her elegant Greenwich Village townhouse, where Sylphid, Eve's 23-year-old daughter from a former marriage, also resides.

Ira's downfall, in typical Rothian fashion, is filtered through the textures of separate memories. One of them belongs to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's longtime fictional impersonation, who as a high school student had been befriended and bedazzled by Ira at the peak of his glory. The other narrative voice is that of Murray Ringold, Ira's elder brother and Nathan's long-ago high school English teacher. Now 90, Murray meets Nathan again and decides to talk about a troubled past: "I'm the only person still living who knows Ira's story, you're the only person still living who cares about it." Murray laughs. "My last task. To file Ira's story with Nathan Zuckerman." Nathan responds, "I don't know what I can do with it."

What Zuckerman/Roth does with this imagined material is constantly mesmerizing. Library shelves groan under the weight of books published about the witch hunts and blacklistings during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, but it would be hard to find one among them that presents as nuanced, as humanly complex an account of those years as I Married a Communist. Nathan, for example, learns from Murray that Ira was a victim of the mania of his times but not an innocent one. He was a dedicated communist who lied to everyone, including Nathan's father, about his adherence to the dictates of Moscow. On the other hand, the forces that destroyed him were not particularly admirable either, beginning with an ill-chosen wife and her vindictive daughter. But even they are not really, in Roth's novel, ultimately culpable. At the end, Nathan stares at the night sky and imagines the stars as the deceased people in his story, freed from praise or censure, burning bright. Roth's fiction achieves at this moment the transcendence of elegy.

--By Paul Gray