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I Married a Communist

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth turns his gaze on 30s and 40s America in this magnificent successor to American Pastoral.

Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge friends become deadly enemies, parents and children estranged, lovers blacklisted and the great felled from vertiginous heights.

'Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity' Mail on Sunday

'A passionate and coruscating American tragedy' Financial Times

© 1998 Philip Roth (P)2023 Penguin Audio

 Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Jewish Literary Fiction Political World Literature Fiction

Critic reviews

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy
Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity
One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails (Xan Brooks)
Quintessential Philip Roth
A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology
Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel
Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago
I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form... Wonderful storytelling and characterisation
The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time
Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force
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