Roland Végső uses literary theory to illuminate the politics and literature of the Cold War during the 1950s. His book demands a background in, or at least a tolerance for, critical theory so that the reader can make sense of sentences such as the following: “I argue that representation must be understood as a form of division introduced into a terrain of ontological inconsistency” (p. 3). For those who persevere, The Naked Communist offers incisive readings of such key 1950s texts as Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (1949) and important 1950s anticommunist novels of both the low-brow (Mickey Spillane) and middle-brow (Ian Fleming) variety.

Végső employs four basic “figures” as a means of organizing and refining his analysis. The nature of atomic warfare made the whole world, the first of the figures, vulnerable to its destructive effects, but the Cold War, in a contrary sense, divided the world into the communist and the free zones. The presence of a menacing but illusory enemy, the second of the figures, meant that the United States needed to rely on nondemocratic measures, such as limiting free speech, in order to preserve democracy. The secret, and in particular the knowledge of how to make and deliver an atomic bomb, put certain topics off limits to normal political processes. The secret, the third of the figures, was good in that it helped to guarantee American military supremacy in a hostile world, but also bad when practiced by Communists in secret cells who wanted to destroy the American way of life. A sense of impending catastrophe, the fourth of Végső’s figures, put the United States in a state of permanent crisis that greatly expanded the presence of the military in everyday American life.

Whether these are in some sense the “correct” figures is difficult to say, and indeed the author might be accused of putting a scientific gloss on an era that can best be chronicled in the subjective terms of the historian, rather than the formalisms of the literary theorist. What, for example, are we to make of the Civil Rights movement that showed up on the edges of 1950s life? For Végső, this movement showed the contradictions between domestic and foreign policy. On the one hand, the racial segregation of the South preserved order and brought stability to society. On the other hand, segregation complicated the anticommunist cause, which to Végső is the national cause, because it made it harder for the United States to win the hearts and minds of people in Third World countries. It is not clear that one gains more explanatory power by employing Végső’s figures than one would by approaching a topic like Civil Rights through the lens of American political development. It mattered that with southern blacks not voting, the constituency of many powerful southern congressmen was white. The Cold War exerted a contrary national pressure that eventually triumphed in 1964 and 1965. The key point is that we need more than the Cold War to understand the Civil Rights movement.

Throughout the book, Végső delights in the existence of contradictions and paradoxes that inform his theory—“while art as such is anti-Communistic not everything that is anti-Communistic is actually art” (p. 82). Jackson Pollack splattering paint on a canvas could be liberating or decadent. Hence, modern art, like the very concept of modernism itself, became a contested realm that, more often than not, was resolved in favor of modernism. Pollack became an exemplar of an American free society that enabled creative artists to thrive, rather than an indicator of a nation too weak, too undisciplined, to face the rigors of the Cold War.

One would not expect Végső to employ the tools of a social scientist or the standard motifs of the historian. Sputnik, which some would highlight as a key turning point in the Cold War, does not show up in the text at all. Political parties divide between Communist and anti-Communist, rather than Republican or Democrat. Hence, the ready means by which the Democrats exploited Sputnik to win the 1958 congressional elections does not much matter to the author, since both parties lived in Cold War America and agreed on most things. This intellectually agile literary approach appears to best advantage in the book’s very skilful readings of Cold War novels, such as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American (1958). On the Beach tells the story of a world-destroying nuclear catastrophe from the standpoint of people in Australia who are waiting for the fallout to reach them. Such fiction helped to establish “the unity of the world.” Végső adroitly contrasts nuclear holocaust fiction with spy novels of the Ian Fleming variety, which “introduced the idea that in order to protect [the necessary world unity] the world of democracy has to be constitutively split between the normal world of publicity and the clandestine world of sovereign violence” (p. 170). Nicely put.

At times, the author takes the analysis beyond the limits of the reader’s patience (or at least the patience of this non-English-major reader). Do Végső’s four figures “haunt the modern imagination because they are historically contingent figures produced by a set of constitutive exclusions” (p. 202)? I leave that question to others but recommend The Naked Communist to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of American anticommunist politics and literature of the 1950s.