I MARRIED A COMMUNIST

By Philip Roth

Houghton Mifflin

$26, 323 pp.

A destroyed man and then "Howl, Howl, Howl!" Philip Roth's most recent books have been about majestic unravelings, a surprisingly soothing theme in the 1990s. The way Roth patiently describes the desperation of his leading men has given mainstream American literature a respectable manliness. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral, a high school golden-boy grows up to a life made miserable by Vietnam politics and 1970s economics, and in the National Book Award-winning Sabbath's Theater, Roth portrays the fat, megalo-maniacally horny Mickey Sabbath as a suicidal Statue of Liberty character. In what William Pritchard described as "one of the greatest sequences in American fiction," Sabbath goes down to the beach near his childhood home, wrapped in an American Flag, and with the accumulated force of 400 pages, soliloquies, "The Atlantic is a powerful ocean. Death is a terrible thing...It was all remarkable. Goodbye, remarkable. Egypt and Greece, goodbye, and goodbye, Rome!"

There was a power there that is missing from Roth's latest big book, I Married a Communist. For a book 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 "for a way not to kill anybody." Ira wantseverything he does to be as big as his own temper,and I Married a Communist is a tragicomedyabout how that attitude didn't really work out.The emotional blindness of this character,however, prevents Roth from reaching his mostpenetrating.

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's revelations.

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.

Murray talks like a teacher, throwing in vocabwords like "obstreperous" and "obviate," lingeringon tangents that are more educational than theyare relevant. Nothing makes criticism of Imarried a Communist more of a dilemma than thehalf tangential/half-conclusive speeches Murraymakes throughout. In a novel that doesn't revolvearound a climax that estranges its main characterfrom the reader by making him the subject of twoother people's conversation, Murray'sphilosophical effervescence is a rare source ofenergy. Yet, it cloys. For example, after a longdiscussion of how Ira's Estonian nurse used topoke fun at his dainty wife by daintily giving Irablow jobs, Murray mildly pontificates:"Revenge...nothing so big in people and nothing sosmall nothing so audaciously creative in even themost ordinary as the workings of revenge."

Maybe this does sound like what a 90-year-old"ace of English teachers" would say. Maybe thesemoments of reflection, springing for thestar-gazing narrators out of the past, are thebrain of Roth's book. If Ira's story seems opaque,maybe it's his brother's act of remembrance thatis tragic and exciting Murray's retellingcertainly determine the structure of the book.Roth, even when speaking through hisquasi-autobiographical Zuckerman, seems tounderstand the historiographic sacrifice thatMurray has to make to remember his brother socompletely.

So the best part about I Married aCommunist is the way Roth has written it. Awriter that is not overtly philosophical, who doessplay his brilliance on 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, except inthat they are punching bags for athleticrecollection.Houghton Mifflin