ABOUT
THE BOOK

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 idealist Communist, a self-educated ditch-digger 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 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 protege 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 portrayl of a post-war 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.