Book Review: "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth

When it comes to Philip Roth, I admittedly have not actually read a lot of his work. I have read American Pastoral and well, apart from that novel I have read a lot of his other writings such as: his conversation with Isaac Bashevic Singer in the New York Times Book Review, 1976, his reading of Saul Bellow in The New Yorker, 2000. There have been some interesting things he has written and, as we know from this book, have been written about him. But, I'm not going to lie, there are some flaws in this book and yet, I enjoyed myself quite a bit. The book feels perfectly plausible in real life and yet, it has many strange things going on. The title of this book is I Married a Communist and just to warn everyone, there is a lot of discrimination in this book that some may feel uncomfortable with reading about.

Set in Newark, New Jersey - the protagonist of the novel is a famed protagonist created by Philip Roth: Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan Zuckerman observes from his school two brothers, one of which claims to be a communist and yet works in radio theatre. A massive fued involving the McCarthyist era seeks to shake the foundations of entertainment and life in this historical novel written on a hatred for the communist regime.

When Ira, the radio theatre 'communist' brother, marries a Hollywood superstar named Eve, they begin to realise that maybe marriage isn't like it is in the movies or on the radio at all. Their honeymoon is tainted with misery and a threatened and carried-out exposure of Ira sees him as an American man who takes his orders from Moscow. In an era of Russian fright in America, this is something that lets the novel explode into a heated anger and you can really feel it come off the pages as if they were soaked in it. That whole part is rather brilliantly written.

The story of Ira is one of almost constant conservation and yet a perpetual need for reinvention. The way both Nathan and Ira's brother Murray talk about him sets in motion a character that we can only see through the eyes and memories of other people - but a character nonetheless, who has left his mark on a lot of different lives - otherwise there would be no point in discussing him.

The opposition between the idea of Ira and the way in which Murray is presented to us is sometimes overlooked in importance. We have a tough-love going on between the brothers, especially in Murray's idea of Ira - it really is hard to say whether it is compassion or pity for the whole scandal with his wife, Eve. But, there is one thing that is certain, whilst Murray is an intellectual and presents almost a quiet, thoughtful demeanour much like a kind of philosopher, Ira is the opposite. Ira is more extroverted and far more about doing than thinking. I would think that this doing and not thinking would have been one of the things to land him in hot water in the first place. The context of the time means that a background check into the woman he married would have been a necessity especially, if he were a communist in America.

All in all, it is a well-written novel that has great ideas about 20th Century America in terms of criticising it and showing it how it once made a fool out of itself. But in the end, there is a quiet redemption in knowing that time is long gone - well, almost gone...