If modern America were confined to attributing its recent history to only three events, a convincing case could be made for Pearl Harbour, the Vietnam War and Watergate. Needless to say, no one could overlook the Kennedy assassination either. Indeed, Kennedy's rise symbolises the epitome of the American Dream just as the post-Camelot era, which includes his posthumous fall from grace, parallels the final collapse of American innocence as encapsulated in the speedy exit from Saigon.
Political chaos, dreams, self-delusion, reinvention and regret are powerful themes in Philip Roth's compelling new novel I Married A Communist (Cape, 16.99 in UK). Though the title suggests some 1960s situation comedy, this is a profound, thoughtful work and a worthy sequel of sorts to the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1998), which it challenges for consideration as his masterwork.
Sexuality and midlife angst have conceded their prime position to Roth's abiding preoccupation, the issue of being Jewish, particularly in America. Yet again he calls upon his fictional alter ego, writer Nathan Zuckerman, to act as his narrator and also as witness.
In American Pastoral Zucker man appeared to have finally slowed down, and even grown up, having experienced a whiff of mortality. In learning to listen instead of ranting about his libido and his career as a famous novelist pursued by sex-crazed women, the no longer self-absorbed Zuckerman becomes an observer and discovers the story of the tragic life of Swede Levov, a High School sporting hero whose glorious beginnings and fairy-tale marriage to a local beauty queen ends in heartbreak. Swede's tragedy mirrors that of America.
The elegaic tone of American Pastoral is continued in I Married a Communist, which also centres around a heroic figure - radio actor Iron Rinn, real name Ira Ringold, a giant of a man and fallen public idol, who is also briefly the young Zuckerman's hero. Ira/Iron becomes famous by impersonating Abe Lincoln, and for all his self-invention is an idealist and a communist - "a poor boy from a hard neighbourhood" - and a simple man enamoured of righteous rhetoric. He is also violent and a victim of his dreams - most pointedly that of his romance with a silent film star whose reinvention is based on the betrayal of her origins. Above all, he is, as his brother reiterates, an angry Jew: "Back in that era, there were a lot of angry Jewish guys around just like Ira." Having selected the young Zuckerman as his protege, Ira/ Iron - at least in his own mind - becomes a mentor. It is he who introduces the young Zuckerman to rural America. The years pass. Eventually life catches up and Zuckerman again finds himself in the role of listener to his former high school English teacher, Murray Ringold, a man with a "passion to explain, to clarify, to make us understand." Murray, we are told from the outset, had a "special talent" for "dramatizing inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell".
No kidding. Murray holds court with a relentless eloquence comparable to that of the Ancient Mariner. Still, you don't spend a career writing fiction shaped by the tough vernacular of America to suddenly abandon a native tongue. This spoken novel never loses its quality of authentic speech from that ragged kingdom Roth has made his own - Newark, New Jersey.
Now ninety but as alert as ever and studying Shakespeare, Murray recreates the history of his kid brother, now dead, and in doing so fills in the gaps of almost a lifetime for Zuckerman, his former pupil, the one-time bright kid who has himself passed sixty, is famous, miserable and alone - determinedly living a hermit's existence. But as Zuckerman stresses, "my seclusion is not the story here . . . I've had my story."
Roth cleverly divides the narrative between Murray the blunt truth teller who is the real hero, and Zuckerman the willing, wistful listener, eager to ask the necessary questions. Not that old Murray shows any signs of weakening. He knows too much, he saw it all happen and has the perfect audience. Just as Zuckerman's tone is one of sustained wonder laced with a sense of pity and regret, Murray displays irony and humour laced with outrage, though tempered too by commendable objectivity.
Murray's recreation of the past invites Zuckerman to remember his father's concerns about the interest Ira had shown in him: ". . . what is this grown man's interest in this kid? He thought something complicated, if not downright sinister, was going on." The barely educated, half-blind Ira proceeds to school the young Zuckerman in communist ideology. McCarthyism plays a central part in the various forms of blackmail and treachery which are perpetrated in the novel. As in American Pastoral, a wayward daughter features as the catalyst guaranteeing that self-delusion and denial have no hope against reality.
A setting straight of the autobiographical record has always been a feature of Roth's fiction. It is a device which has become more subtle with time. In fact, Roth, for so long the brash Jewish kid most concerned with his sexuality, his literary fame, his Jewishness, has acquired an unexpected depth and humanity. There are flashes of vicious humour here, largely as expressed by the vengeful harpist daughter. But again, this novel is another lament. The pensive Zuckerman alone on his mountain is conscious of seeing "with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand".
This is a novel of voices. In addition to our able co-narrators, the other characters intervene forcefully, often colourfully. Ira's story becomes that of Murray and ultimately of America. Having written his two finest most convincing works at this late-mid stage of his career (only The Counterlife [1986] approaches them in quality), Roth has progressed from being a chronicler of self to a chronicler of his country. It is a remarkable and urgent late flowering. What more is to come?
