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none in his own neighborhood. But each of the fathers are, at the same time, troubled and
saddened by their wives’s materialism. Levov’s spouse, Dawn, is preoccupied with the
local gentry and raising prize cattle. She has an affair with the neighborhood architect
who is designing their new home. Her husband is enraged in no small part because he had
paid twelve thousand dollars for her plastic surgery that she described as having given her
a “new life”(366). Levov is even more angry, however, when he overhears his wife
complain that she always hated her house since it was as if he learned that “she had
always hated her husband” (189). As their ownership of property/wives disintegrates,
these men seek affection elsewhere, awakening incestual fears of the daughters.
To say that the figures in Roth’s trilogy displace their troubles on politics is
accurate in a broad sense yet this conclusion assumes a degree of independence in their
lives that is lacking. As “self made” men. Reingold, Levov and Silk are foremost political
creations themselves. Reingold is no longer a manual laborer but a “popular culture”
Communist, a cultural type that emerged after the Popular Front period in 1936 and was
destroyed by another populist movement, led by Joseph McCarthy. Having embraced the
CPUSA strategy of embracing all things “progressive” in American culture, he eats hot
dogs and follows baseball, supports the politics of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln
as exemplars of the common man. An “easy mark for the utopian vision” of Henry
Wallace, Reingold is proud of his independence of thought at the same time that he
dutifully obeys each change in Communist Party position. Silk is an academic elitist who
loathes feminism and disparages the “fulminations of the Black Panthers, the
metamorphoses of Malcolm X, the rhetoric of James Baldwin” (154). Suffering from his
own banishment during the Lewinsky affair, Silk empathizes with the President as a
Convention