As The Cut reports, Vivian Gornick’s 1977 The Romance of American Communism is experiencing a second life, much to the author’s puzzlement.
If, as often happens, her admirer is too young to remember the Cold War, Gornick tries to clarify a point that she fears has been missed. “I say, ‘This is about the Communist Party, not social democracy,’” she says, sitting in her West Village apartment one afternoon in November. “It was the most authoritarian . . . ” she trails off into incredulous laughter. “I don’t know why they want to read it.”
I have not read the book, but I endorse the revival of interest in (but not sympathy for) the Communist Party of the United States and the left-wing tendency associated with it. I hope they read “Radical Chic” and The Black Book of Communism, too.