I Married a Communist - Phlip Roth

This is the first book I've read penned by Philip Roth, and my expectations were off-kilter. I see his genius with the pen, but man, oh, man this book was a slog to get through. In my eyes, this book is summed up well in a couple of brilliant paragraphs:

"There was one song she (ed. Lorraine, Murray's daughter) especially loved. It was beautiful, too, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong called 'Dubinushka,' a simple song sung with a balalaika in the background. The words to 'Dubinushka' were printed in English on the inside of the album cover, and she learned them by heart and went around the house singing them for months.

Many songs I have heard in my native land - Songs of joy and sorrow But one of them was deeply engraved in my memory: It's the song of the common worker.

That was the solo part. But what she liked best to sing was the choral refrain. Because it had 'heave-ho' in it.

Ekh, lift up the cudgel, Heave-ho! Pull harder together, Heave-ho!"

… In the dark we listened, though now neither I to him nor her to me but both of us to "Dubinushka." It was just as Murray had described it: beautiful, a stirring, mournful, hymnlike folksong. Except for the crackle off the worn surface of the old record - a cyclical sound not unlike some familiar, nocturnal night noise of the summer countryside - the song seemed to be traveling to us from a remote historical past. It wasn't at all like lying on my deck listening to the radio to the Saturday night concerts live from Tanglewood. "Heave-ho! Heave-ho!" was out of a distant place and time, a spectral residue of those rapturous revolutionary days when everyone craving for change programmatically, naively - madly, unforgivably - underestimates how mankind mangles its noblest ideas and turns them into tragic farce. Heave-ho! Heave-ho! As though human wiliness, weakness, stupidity, and corruption didn't stand a chance against the collective, against the might of the people pulling together to renew their lives and abolish injustice. Heave-ho.

I didn't appreciate 320 pages of two characters talking about a third character. Mamet once wrote in a memo to screenwriters that "ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT." To be fair, Mamet was referring to TV drama, and not a novel, but this ENTIRE NOVEL IS TWO CHARACTERS TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, and it caused the same boredom in me that Mamet warns about.