Why marry a Communist when you can have a computer?

Now about Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist. I bought the book in a large, four storey bookstore in Bern that had a full floor of books in English. I had prematurely finished the book I brought with me, Tracey Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn, which had seemed like the appropriate book to read on a trip through Europe (about a family of tapestry makers in Belgium). But it was so good that I finished it on the plane trip to Zurich and, feeling naked without a book to read, was happy to find such a large selection in Bern.

The Roth book was different than I expected. I had read Portnoy’s Complaint many years ago and still remember it’s biting wit and view of Jewish/Goy relationships. (Especially the part where, when the proper young gentile girlfriend of the sexually obsessed Portnoy of proper Jewish upbringing, is asked at a cocktail party by a friend of her parents, what she had been doing all summer, she replied: “Growing a penis.”) So I expected more of the same. But this book, being based on actual events during the Communist scare in the late 40’s, early 50’s, the McCarthy era, was slow to get into (pun not intended!). I’m not great on political history and it was written as a retelling of events, rather than through immediate action, so it took a lot of attention to stay with it.

I was reading this book on the plane from Amsterdam to Newark. Sitting next to me was a grey haired man with a ponytail. He slept for a while and, at some point, woke and mentioned to me that he couldn’t help noticing the title of the book. He told me he was from the Soviet Union, had left in the late 80’s. Because he was Jewish, he and his family were allowed to leave. He and his wife came to New York City and later to upstate New York. We were talking for a short while when he mentioned, in the course of a conversation about people not reading as much as they used to, that his son is addicted to computer games. He said that is all the child wants to do. He comes home from school and goes right to the computer and stays on it until bedtime, isn’t interested in anything else, doesn’t pay attention in school, doesn’t play with other children much. So I told him it might be a good idea to limit how long he is on the computer. I did it with my children with TV: they were allowed so much time per day (I think it was an hour) and if they wanted to watch a longer show, they had to take it from another day, like rationing it out. His reply was: “Oh, no. It’s too late now. He’s already seven years old.”

At which point, I excused myself and became seriously absorbed in my book. And actually really began to enjoy it. It is a good book, looking at relationships from many points of view: love, anger, obsession or perhaps more the politics of obsession viewed from many angles. Looking at what motivates a person to pursue their beliefs, whether it is in a relationship with a person or an idea. And this done through the looking back on and piecing together, reminiscing on the experiences of a fanatic. So, in the case of Ira Ringold, the sad, obsesssed “hero” of this novel, if it hadn’t been Communism, what else might have driven his life to the inevitable self-destruction that he courted? Computer games?

Posted by leya at June 13, 2005 05:48 PM