Red Love.

Mr. Williamson is Senior Editor for Books with Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

IN ITS political dimension, this skillfully written novel may be described as a literary celebration of the collapse of the structure of Marxist-Leninist thought everywhere in the world except for the People's Republic of China, Cuba, a few benighted and remote ex-satrapies of the Soviet Union that might have been imaginative inventions of Evelyn Waugh, and the American academy. In its literary one, it is a dramatic exploration of the historical, the intellectual, and the personal distortions associated with Marxism-Leninism, in particular as they manifested themselves in the atomic espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial and executions that resulted from it. David Evanier has renamed the Rosenbergs Solomon and Dolores Rubell and undertaken an imaginative reconstruction of them, of their associates, and of the "progressive" culture they exemplified, to create a heightened reality that exists as a mythic alternative to the original one. As the novel's epigraph-a quotation from Black Elkhas it, "Whether it happened so or not, I do not know. But if you think about it, you can see that it is true."

The book is postmodernist in technique insofar as its construction by a "reporter" (who we learn in the Prologue is one Gerald Lerner) is part of its own story. It is not, however, self-reflexive or subjective: essentially, Red Love is a social and political novel whose realism, pathos, satire, and tragedy are lightened by comic surrealism that shades in places into pure farce, much of it hilarious. Sometimes, though, the farcical, not having been properly prepared for by the author, is intrusive and confusing, as in the very witty trial scene near the end of the book. Similarly, the chapter "Letters from Amerika," consisting of silly and idiotically fatuous notes exchanged by the Rubells in their prison cells while they await execution, appears to me to be a comic, polemical avoidance of what should at this point in the work have been the novelist's chief aim, namely, to grapple finally with the problem of Solly and Dolly Rubell's perverse and enigmatic humanity. And "the Reverend Very Big Bob," a madcap spoof on radio evangelism, while wickedly funny in itself, comes out of nowhere to create the suspicion that its inclusion has a political rather than an artistic rationale; that it is intended as a token attack on the Middle America the Rubells and their fellow "progressives" despised--as a piddling ideological counterweight to the massively anti-progressive thrust of the novel.

The chapters, or dramatic sections, vary greatly in length and have to do with a wide range of characters whose stories are linked thematically, so as to comment indirectly on those of other characters, not by exigencies of plot or even of any clearly articulated central story. Although the Rubells never really develop beyond the revolutionary-poster concept that Evanier makes clear is their own perception of themselves, the people in the book whose lifelong inspiration has been that "progressive" ideal which the Rubells symbolize are Red Love's richest material, and David Evanier's finest literary achievement to date. (He is the author of two other books, The One-Star Jew, a novel, and a collection of stories, The Swinging Headhunter.) "The Last Stalinist" concerns an old lady, Sylvia Pollack, who refuses to abandon the Marxist-Leninist dream to which she has sacrificed her only son, who hanged himself in her New York apartment while she was away practicing her activism in Cleveland. "'That's the kind of society we have,"' Sylvia triumphantly tells the reporter, after explaining how her son had been turned away by a guard at the mental hospital where he sought admittance. But when Gerald Lerner presses to know how she felt at Khrushchev's revelation that the Moscow Trials had been rigged and their victims innocent: 'Listen,' Sylvia said, I don't think about the individual."'

Sylvia Pollack's story appears at first to be paralleled by that of another die-hard Communist, also an old lady at the time Gerald Lerner meets her, who had testified for the defense at the Rubells' trial many years before. But Manya Poffnick is unable to carry through quite to the end, although in her old age she does join the Black Panther Party. Gradually her disillusionment with the Communist Party grows as she comes increasingly to understand that the Communists cared nothing for the Rubells once they had been apprehended, and in fact wished to see them dead, the sooner the better. 'You see, we live in a democracy,"' Manya finds herself telling people at the end of her life. But following her death in a "monastic room" with a view of "the majestic sweep of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine," a memorial service is held for her by a group of her fellow progressives," one of whom opens her overcoat to reveal a display of revolutionary buttons. 'This,' [the woman] said, pointing to each button, 'is what Manya was."'

Evanier's primary concern is to explain how such people as the Rubells in particular and "progressive humanity" in general could have existed in the first place; his conclusion, though implicit, is nevertheless clear. It is not a terribly original conclusion, but never has the truth of it, to my knowledge, been more effectively dramatized. Overhearing the prison guards discussing Solomon Rubell's impending death, Rubell's sister has to fight the urge to run to them, crying, "'He'll never die!"' At one point, the narrator refers to Solly as "the lamb." "'By dying,"' Ziggy Weissberger, the head of the Party's Committee to Resurrect the Rubells, tells his comrades, "'the Rubells will live forever."' "'Who were the Rubells?"' an activist demands at a Rubell memorial service held thirty years after the executions had taken place. "'They were nobody, for Christ's sake. And boy, were they ever reliable. Simple little progressive people who drank deeply from the fountain of pure advanced thought."' The religious--even Christian-imagery is patent, and unveiled.

"'We have shared the best kind of love,"' Dolly Rubell writes in prison to her husband. "'Red love. The color of history, sex, blood, and revenge."' The operation of that love is the enveloping action of David Evanier's novel: charity in its every manifestation directed perversely, horribly, and finally with catastrophic result out of the deeply dug channel in which it has always been intended that human love should run.