I Married A Communist (American Trilogy Book 2) by Philip Roth

"This is the story of Ira Ringold, a Jew from Newark who becomes a big star on radio and then is destroyed in the period of the McCarthy witch-hunts. This is the story of a failed marriage; of toxic family relationships; of male adolescence and male role models and masculinity; of morality and its lack; of ageing; of literature; of anti-Semitism; of politics; of fanaticism; of hypocrisy; of betrayal. This is the story of a particular America in a particular time and place; a story that presages the America of today. I Married a Communist is the second volume of what is known as Roth’s American Trilogy, preceded by American Pastoral, which I declared to be The Great American Novel, and followed by The Human Stain. They are not a trilogy in the sense that the word tends to be used today – each of these stands complete on its own, connected only in the sense that the three together are Roth’s attempt to make sense of America at the end of the 20th century by looking back over the decades of the mid-century. In each the story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a barely disguised alter-ego of Roth himself...."

Philip Roth는 대단한 작가이다. 흥미로운 작품이지만 어려운 작품이기도 하다. 책으로 읽기보다는 전자책으로 보는 게 더 좋지 않을까 하는 생각을 했다. 1940년대 중반이 시대적 배경이고 작가가 작품 속에서 어느 정도는 설명을 해주지만... 그 당시의 복잡한 분위기를 좀 더 이해하기 위해서 인터넷의 도움을 받아야 하는 작품이었다. 쉽게 읽고 넘어갈 수 없는  문장이나 표현들도 많은 거 같다. 작품이 추구하는 이야기나 전개 방식은 친숙한 면을 갖고 있지만 작품 속에 등장하는 멋진 문장들은 계속 밑줄을 치게 만든다. "...... Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it's because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper's half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaufurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world's oldest demoratic republic..." 어느 시대든 정도의 차이는 있어도 '맥카시즘' 같은 불행한 일이 일어나는 거 같다. 담에 한 번 더 읽어 봐야겠다.