Not as expansive as American Pastoral, but searching, incisive, brilliant, and quite the page-turner. While I found Roth's last, Exit Ghost, to be an anemic excuse for Roth's long literary rants, this one is a living breathing story on its own. Ira Ringold, the Communist in the title, is a tragic figure who uses ideology, and marriage, as a desperate protection against his own dark side. His wife, the aptly-named Eve Frame, betrays Ira to the red-baiting journalists of the time by participating in a libelous book that gives the novel its title. Indeed, betrayal, of self and of others, is one of the larger themes of a book that ruminates on what it what it means to be human. Can we as humans not betray? This is ultimately a story of human relationships and the mess we make of them, rather than a grand discourse on the politics of the time, and it is all the more interesting for that. (Oh, and the gossip? I don't care about that, and it surprised me how often it turned up in reviews). ( )

disfrute mucho oir el libro mientras estaba en el taller. tiene mucho en comun con american pastoral. no es tan fuerte como pastoral pero hay riqueza en el libro. no se como explicarlo. supongo que me refiero a como interpreta a los personajes. las discusiones de arte me interesaron. me interesa que roth trabaja con historia. y me interesa que es historia reciente. es una forma de entender los estados unidos. algunos temas me recordaron a la familia. incluyendo la forma en que muere la esposa de murray. me estuvo curioso el contraste con latinoamerica. el final es interesante por que le da significado mas amplio a todo lo que paso antes. me pregunto si eso no debio haber ocurrido antes. las paginas finales las escribio con inspiracion. ( )

An interesting novel in which the author portrays very clearly the ethos of a time and place. Some good stuff, but this is too rambling and disjointed. The central character is a victim of McCarthyism, but is a deeply unsympathetic, pathologically angry, violent individual. Indeed, McCarthyism is almost incidental to the book, which is more about one man's struggle to come to terms with his own nature. ( )

This book is not considered one of Roth's strongest - but I found it readable, though provoking, and a great story. ( )