num_pages: 325
description: Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins.On his way to political catastrophe, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll in a tasteful Manhattan townhouse to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And, with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal. Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace is narrated years later by his brother, Murray Ringold, whose former student, the adolescent Nathan Zuckerman, was the radio actor's adoring protégé in the late forties. It is a story of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life. In Roth's previous novel—the Pulitzer Prize winner American Pastoral—we heard the terrifying, heartrending story of Swede Levov, a decent American meeting his indecent destiny in an America torn apart in the sixties by the Vietnam War. The novel I Married a Communist continues Roth's brilliant fictional portrayal of a postwar history in which private needs and public acts are inextricably joined—and in which the consequences are as harrowing for the country as for the Levovs and the Ringolds of Roth's meticulously resurrected American ruin, Newark, New Jersey.I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one—fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and politically accurate.—from the front and back flaps of the cover
language: English
title: I Married a Communist
titlecomplete: I Married a Communist (The American Trilogy, #2)
characters: Nathan Zuckerman
genres: Fiction, Contemporary, The United States Of America, Politics, American, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Americana, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 8889
places: The United States of America
series: Complete Nathan Zuckerman, The American Trilogy
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist
publisher: Houghton Mifflin