Word: brothers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...since the supporting cast does not add much. Thomas Ian Griffith makes for a striking, if rather dull, villain, leering savagely but saying little of interest. Daniel Baldwin has a solid rapport with Woods and brings a rugged toughness to Montoya, but he can't shake his comical "Baldwin brother" reputation (he's the portly one) and brings utterly no credence to his silly romantic subplot with Sheryl Lee's Katrina...
...narrative toreadors are his brother,Murray Ringold, and Nathan Zuckerman, Roth'sperennial almost-autobiographer. Sitting onZuckerman's deck, burning a citronella candle,they talk, for six nights, about Ira. In the firstthird of the book, the plot of Ira's life has beensketched, and what follows is Murray and Zuckermanunpacking. Murray utters his six-night fractalintensification of detail, and Zuckerman listens,rapt to elderly Murray's deposition on his deathbrother. as a teenager, Zuckerman had taken Ira onas a mentor, and Roth is at his most interestingwhen he illustrates the knee-jerk memories evokedin Zuckerman by Murray's revelations...
While Ira's end is obvious early in IMarried a Communist, Murray and Zuckermanrefine their interpretation of him until the veryend. This generates the book's suspense. Murray,especially, likes to draw conclusions: blanksympathy, then a view of his brother as acommunist, then an exploration of why his brotheris a communist, then of why Ira is generally sofrustrated...
Maybe this does sound like what a 90-year-old"ace of English teachers" would say. Maybe thesemoments of reflection, springing for thestar-gazing narrators out of the past, are thebrain of Roth's book. If Ira's story seems opaque,maybe it's his brother's act of remembrance thatis tragic and exciting Murray's retellingcertainly determine the structure of the book.Roth, even when speaking through hisquasi-autobiographical Zuckerman, seems tounderstand the historiographic sacrifice thatMurray has to make to remember his brother socompletely...
...mother used to dress up my brother and I in Santa Lucia costumes," she said. "At school, him, a friend and I would go from classroom to classroom singing traditional Swedish songs...