Word: ringold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MARRIED A COMMUNIST Iron Rinn, ne Ira Ringold, is a prominent radio actor during the late '40s and early '50s whose career collapses when his estranged wife writes a book titled, quite accurately, I Married a Communist. Philip Roth filters the story of Rinn's downfall through the memories of two men who loved and admired him. The mania of the Red-baiting days is recorded with perfect pitch. Roth's look at the past is harrowing and mesmerizing...
...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...
...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...
...some cyber-velocitywindscreen, who certainly does not try to seemcorrect or even revolutionary, Roth always does anamazing job of talking about important things. Inthe present case, that important thing is growingold, without regret but without forgetting thepain. The fireworks and the turgor of MickeySabbath are missed in Ira Ringold, but the radicalmaturity of Murray Ringold manages to stand intheir place. Pervertedly healthy Roth's MurrayRingold interrogates the past as if he still hadtime to learn from it (He dies two months afterthe story's present). The clearest communicationin I Married a Communist has little to dowith communism or troubled marriages...
...Rothian fashion, is filtered through the textures of separate memories. One of them belongs to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's longtime fictional impersonation, who as a high school student had been befriended and bedazzled by Ira at the peak of his glory. The other narrative voice is that of Murray Ringold, Ira's elder brother and Nathan's long-ago high school English teacher. Now 90, Murray meets Nathan again and decides to talk about a troubled past: "I'm the only person still living who knows Ira's story, you're the only person still living who cares about...