Word: iras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with a scarlet cover, I Married a Communist ends up feeling more like an emergency room than a bloody battlefield. It has, like its predecessors, an angry Jew from Newark, but his passion never really climaxes, and his understanding of the world never really evokes sympathy. This man, irate Ira Ringold, is a 1950s radio star who has never given up the Communist passions he picked up as an uneducated GI and whose marriage to a Hollywood actress, a closet Jew in thrall to her 24 year old harpist daughter, is a poor buffer against Ira's ongoing, subconscioussearch...
...Ira's 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...
Sometimes these two voices sound too alike,Murray and Zuckerman are both old, wifeless andliterate. Shakespeare is quoted. Ira's boringtirades are related in the sweet, slow molassesconversation of these two old men. The style islike the slow tourist boats that puff down theRhine, playing the uncanny Lorelei, the ballad oflove lost on the Rhine's violent rocks. It is thesort of voice Roth always does well, but it losesits punch when scattered across two differentpersonalities...
...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...
Some music may actually sound as if George Gershwin wrote it, but Ira Gershwin's lyrics and style were not so readily mimicked. MITCHELL J. RYCUS Ann Arbor, Mich...