Word: roth
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Junior Shara Miller smashed Providence College's Katie Lafayette in the first round of the D-Flight singles, 6-1, 6-3. In the semifinals, she beat Dart-mouth's Carolyn Roth, 7-6 (7-3), 2-6, 6-4. This brought her to the final where she faced off against Caroline Bashleben, also from Dartmouth. Even with Miller's impressive groundstrokes and tenacious, gritty play, she could not pull out a victory, losing...
...Jewish man from Newark, N.J., achieves worldly success and happiness only to have his life ruined by his deranged daughter. That is the central story of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), which earlier this year was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Now comes Roth's I Married a Communist (Houghton Mifflin; 323 pages; $26), which portrays a Jewish man from Newark, N.J., who achieves worldly success and happiness, only to have his life ruined by a deranged stepdaughter. Anyone who thinks these two plots are too similar to justify separate novels probably has not been paying attention to Roth...
...public events during the turbulent 1960s. I Married a Communist sets the calendar back to the late '40s and early '50s, the era of Red baiting and McCarthyism in the U.S., when communists, actual or accused, were hounded into disgrace and unemployment or jail. One of them, according to Roth's novel, was Iron Rinn, ne Ira Ringold, a gangly (6-ft. 6-in.) son of Newark who had circuitously risen, after his military service during World War II, to become a prominent radio actor in Manhattan. Ira's new fame brings rewards. He marries Eve Frame, a one-time...
...downfall, in typical 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...
...dedicated communist who lied to everyone, including Nathan's father, about his adherence to the dictates of Moscow. On the other hand, the forces that destroyed him were not particularly admirable either, beginning with an ill-chosen wife and her vindictive daughter. But even they are not really, in Roth's novel, ultimately culpable. At the end, Nathan stares at the night sky and imagines the stars as the deceased people in his story, freed from praise or censure, burning bright. Roth's fiction achieves at this moment the transcendence of elegy...