I Married a Communist.

Philip Roth Houghton, Mifflin, $26,323 pp.

Nathan Zuckerman sits in the dark on the deck of his house in the woods, claiming to be played out. "I've had my story," he says. If you've read any of the books that feature Philip Roth's alter ego, you'll call this an understatement; you may also recall that, big talker though he is, Zuckerman has a knack for making another guy's story his.

The voice of his ninety-year-old former English teacher, Murray Ringold, is what brings back the past to Zuckerman in Roth's latest novel. Talking on the deck, the two men share memories of the years after World War II, when Americans were still listening in the dark to patriotic programs on the radio - the decade when America began to be torn apart by the righteous rhetoric that had helped it win the war. History as Zuckerman-Roth conceives it begins as usual in Newark, New Jersey, where in 1946 he was an idealistic high school student and Murray an inspiring teacher, "altogether natural in his manner...while in his speech verbally copious and intellectually almost menacing." Nathan admired "the vocation of a male high school teacher like Murray Ringold, who wasn't lost in the amorphous American aspiration to make it big," but Murray's simpler brother Ira - who did make it big, as the radio star Iron Rinn - was the man who became his hero.

As in American Pastoral, Roth's 1997 novel about the violent intersection of political and private life in the sixties, the figure at the center of this story is a giant of a man, so nonverbal and spontaneous, so altogether un-Zuckerman-like, that even though he hails from Jewish Newark he can pass for a real American - which helps do him in. Ira-Iron is a Lincoln look-alike, unironic and pathologically irate. "Back in that era, there were a lot of angry Jewish guys around like Ira," Murray recalls. "That's one of the biggest things that America gave to the Jews - gave them their anger....Especially after the war." Ira is converted to communism during. the war by his army buddy Johnny O'Day.

Like "The Swede" in American Pastoral, Ira eludes Roth, for all that the young Zuckerman admired him. (Is one impulse behind these books Zuckerman-Roth's attempt to figure out how come he looked up to those guys in high school?) And Murray lacks the hopped-up energy of The Swede's smarter brother, who helps make American Pastoral a more brilliant book. "Ira smelled like sap," Murray remembers; Nathan learns the extent to which Ira was a sap, greedy, credulous, indeed criminal. Iron Rinn marries the genteel and would-be Gentile actress Eve Frame, whom he uses as a front; he puts up with her perverse bond to her fat daughter; he betrays Eve, and she retaliates. But in spite of their flamboyance, Ira and Eve remain distant characters; Murray's and Nathan's rich ruminations on the human propensity for betrayal and revenge are more compelling.

Roth can still serve up succulent details, and readers of a certain age especially will resonate to evocations of the daily life of fifty years ago, when women "had to be fit to lean from their open back windows while rooted to the floor of the apartment and, whatever the temperature - up there like seamen at work in the rigging - to hang the wet clothes out on the clothesline, to peg them with the clothespins an item at a time, feeding the line out until all the waterlogged family wash was hung and the line was full and flapping in the air of industrial Newark." I Married a Communist is a historical novel doubly driven by Murray's memory and Zuckerman's, the pressure of the past and the urgent need to recall. By telling a story rooted in a certain time and place and political atmosphere, it opens the question of fiction's truth to history. Roth seems to have a melancholy, mainstream view of the plight of idealism in postwar America, seeing good men defeated and flawed ones deluded as things go from bad to worse in Newark and in general.

It is as an autobiographical work that I Married a Communist poses its most pointed questions about truth to (personal) history. The novel's title is also the title of the tell-all memoir about Iron Rinn that Eve writes - rather, has written for her, by a couple of Red-hunters who seek (just as Ira does) to use celebrity for political purposes. Roth's reader cannot but hear the phrase as archly or parodically confessional - as "I Married a Memoirist," perhaps, or "I Married a Novelist," which is what he probably thinks his actress-ex-wife's memoir (Leaving a Doll's House by Claire Bloom) should have been called. The joke isn't too bad, but the taste is: Roth nails fiction to fact with a sure aim that makes one wince. The larger problem is that, as Roth makes sure we know he knows, celebrity and notoriety drive out all kinds of truth. Eve's betrayal of Ira with the help of the mandarin gossips Katrina Van Tassel and Bryden Grant is paralleled by young Nathan Zuckerman's betrayal of himself: at a party, he asks Katrina for her autograph, compelled in spite of his disdain for her by the glamour of celebrity and power. The scene is ambiguously moving because we know celebrity is in the cards for Zuckerman-Roth himself.

Signing names, changing names, naming names - Katrina's and Eve's and Senator Joseph McCarthy's power, in the fifties, and Roth's and other people's today - are what this book is all about. The subject is great and manifold, and Roth is the man to mine it. Of McCarthy he writes shrewdly that "he understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That's how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment." One takes the prescient point: that's where the country is now, with grave consequences for both politics and culture.

But naming names is also the tactic of the writer who wants to sort things out and understand them. Toward the end of this novel, an exuberant riff on Nixon's televised funeral names names so as to list our national disgraces: "Gerald Ford. I don't ever remember Gerald Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his famous salute, that salute of his that was always half meshugeh. Bob Hope seated next to James Baker...." Is this fiction? Journalism? History? Memoir? Political analysis? Theater review or expose? Or is there only one encompassing genre now, for a master chronicler of the American twentieth century, and himself in it?

Rachel M. Brownstein is a professor of English at Brooklyn College and at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she runs the Liberal Studies Program.