Wholly
Sanctimony
I Married a Communist
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Co.; 336 pp. $26.00
The first thing anyone will want to know about Philip Roth's eighteenth novel is whether
it is as superbly good as his seventeenth, American Pastoral. The answer is: no,
nowhere near. Is it any good at all? Sure: taken simply as a novel, I Married a
Communist is better than most of those that cross a reviewer's desk. Roth's a pro,
for Heaven's sake; he knows how to do the business. There is, however, an attitude, an
odor to IMAC, that I think will make this particular book unpalatable to readers
of this particular magazine, as it was to me.
The story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's favorite self-impersonation, now in his
sixties. Nathan encounters his high-school English teacher, Murray Ringold, ninety years
old. What follows is a mix of reminiscences by Nathan and Murray, all centered on the tale
of Murray's brother Ira, the communist of the title. Nathan himself knew Ira briefly, and
idolized him for a year or two before leaving home to attend college. Ira was a radio
personality until being blacklisted in 1951.
So here we are among the familiar stage scenery of the McCarthy period: those betrayals,
those namings of names, those lists. This, I admit, predisposes me against the book. I
don't doubt that Tailgunner Joe was a malicious clown, who generated much petty injustice;
but in the rhetoric of the Left, it is all so overblown. They are forever telling us, as
Murray does in IMAC, that there were "Thousands and thousands of Americans
destroyed in those years..." On further exposition, "destroyed" turns out
to mean that the victim lost a glamorous job like Ira's, or a rewarding one like Murray's,
and had to take up the kind of dull, badly-paid work most people do all their lives.
Meanwhile, in those nations that fell to communism, "destroyed" had a more
straightforward meaning-- and not for mere thousands, but for tens of millions.
Then there is that odor-- not of sanctity, but of sanctimony. Everywhere in this
book-- in the mouths of Murray, Ira and Nathan himself-- is the insufferable
self-righteousness of the Left, served up neat, without any irony I could detect. In one
of the least convincing passages, Ira chokes up-- literally-- at the recollection of
seeing Iranian children living on a garbage dump. What sensitivity! Sure (Roth is telling
us) these commies may have been wrong-headed-- but what idealists they were! So they were;
so were hundreds of thousands of the Germans who died for Hitler. People will act with
great nobility in a foul cause. Does Mr Roth have any plans for a book called I
Married a Nazi?
Contrariwise with the villains of the novel, Bryden Grant and his wife Katrina. It is
Katrina who ghosts the book I Married a Communist, in which Ira's wife exposes
him. (A title within a title, see? Roth can never altogether resist scratching that
self-referential itch. One of his previous novels contained a character called Philip
Roth.) Bryden, a former gossip columnist, gets elected Congressman and appointed to the
House Un-American Activities Committee. As a member of that committee, he causes Murray to
lose his job. Being Republicans and anti-communists, the Grants must, of course, be
portrayed as moral nullities. No choking up over third-world kiddies for them! From the
viewpoint of this novel, no anti-communist-- nobody to the right of Adlai Stevenson, in
fact-- could possibly be motivated by anything but vanity and greed. Says Murray:
"All that mattered to the Grants was how to make Ira serve their cause. And what was
their cause? America? Democracy? If ever patriotism was a pretext for self-seeking, for
self-devotion, for self-adoration..."
Murray then commences a long tirade about seeing Richard Nixon's funeral on TV. I don't
think you would need to be a fan of the thirty-seventh president to find this passage
loathsome. Kicking a man when he's down is bad enough; but when he's dead? Not that the
living are spared in this unseemly rant.
"[Senator Bob] Dole and his flood of lachrymose clichés. 'Doctor' Kissinger... with
all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge... Ronald Reagan snapping the honor
guard... that salute of his that was always half meshugeh..." [Roth's
italics.]
What are those quotes doing around Kissinger's title? (Later in the passage, after some
sneering at his figure, Kissinger is referred to as "the court Jew".) What does
Roth want us to think about a man who could make that despicable allusion to Ronald
Reagan's present infirmity? So far as I could tell, he wants us to admire him. A fiction
writer is entitled to presumption of innocence in respect of his characters' opinions, but
in the absence of irony or rebuttal the horrid thought keeps surfacing: Perhaps Roth
himself feels this way! Perhaps it's Roth's voice we're hearing!
As I said, it's not a bad novel, as novels go nowadays. There is a discernible story and
some excellent secondary characters (always a strong point of Roth's); though I think Ira
himself is a failure, with no more blood in him than one of those thirty-foot statues of
the heroic worker, hammer brandished aloft, that used to blight the public squares in
Tirana and Blagovashchensk. The book's problem is one of attitude: the assumption that we
all share the sentiments of the old Left. Not a fondness for communism-- even the American
Left has given up on that-- but a gnawing, unsleeping, undiminishing, everlasting hatred
of anti-communism. There is carelessness in the writing, too: Switzerland's currency is
the Franc, not the Mark, and I do not believe the word "racism" was current in
the 1940s. Whatever happened to editing? |