I Married a Communist

It may be pure coincidence, but in 1996 Philip Roth's ex-wife, Claire Bloom — an actress with a cultivated, patrician aura — published Leaving a Doll's House, a scathing memoir of her 18 years with Roth. In Roth's new novel, I Married a Communist, Eve Frame — an actress with a cultivated, patrician aura — publishes a scathing, distorted memoir that destroys her ex-husband.

But the novel earns itself something more than the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Revenge. Set in the McCarthy era, it telescopes the 1950s culture of hysterical anticommunism with our 1990s culture of hysterical Monicaism, our politics of voyeurism, and our frantic scandal consumerism. It sees McCarthy ''inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip.... McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace.''

The main character, Ira Ringold, is a tall, not very bright guy from working-class Newark whose resemblance to Abe Lincoln lands him in some pageantry and then a starring role in The Free and the Brave, a radio program dramatizing American history. He joins the Communist party, though he won't admit it. On the way up he marries Eve, a beautiful former silent-screen star with upper-class affectations (including casual anti-Semitism), who was born Chava Fromkin in Brooklyn, though she won't admit it. After their marriage fails and her book comes out, Ira winds up, blacklisted and bitter, in a rural New Jersey shack, but Eve goes under too, her facade dismantled by liberal journalists.

The story has familiar Rothian elements, including Newark nostalgia and Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's designated double. Possibly because their story is filtered through Ira's brother, both Ira and Eve remain rather remote. The nostalgia — not only for vanished Newark but for a time when political idealism and artistic seriousness seemed like live options — is nicely consummated in a lyrical closing passage that grants both art and memory the power to distill timeless essences from the comedy of errors known as life. B+