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). ( )

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. ( )