The Plot Against America Summary - eNotes.com The Plot Against America Summary link Link In the 1940 of Philip Roth’s reimagined history, many Americans are so afraid that President Franklin D. Roosevelt is leading the country into the war in Europe that the Republican Party nominates not Wendell Wilkie but Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero who was the first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean solo. To the great consternation of American Jews, Lindbergh wins the election. Jews are concerned because Lindbergh not only has admired the German Luftwaffe but also has accepted a medal from Adolf Hitler himself, a clear sign of his pro-German sympathies. As nine-year-old Philip Roth narrates events, the Roth family—including Philip’s father and mother, Herman and Besse, and his older brother, Sandy—and their friends in the Jewish section of Newark, New Jersey, are terribly upset by this turn of events and fear the worst. They suspect that the kinds of anti-Semitism that Hitler has propounded and is rapidly carrying out in Germany and in the parts of Europe that he has conquered will, under Lindbergh’s administration, begin to happen in the United States.

The first experience that they have of this intolerance comes during a trip to Washington, D.C., where they are expelled from their hotel despite their confirmed reservations. This outrage is followed by a scene in a cafeteria where the family experiences anti-Semitic slurs. Worse events are still to follow. Not all Jews believe as Herman Roth believes. A rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf, supports the new administration and soon becomes head of the Office of American Absorption. This new office is established to promote Lindbergh’s plan to disperse Jews from enclaves, such as the one in which the Roths live in Newark, to other parts of the country, thereby promoting their... (The entire section is 718 words.) Get Free Access link Link In a sense, every novel is alternative history, an attempt to imagine how things might have been. A specific genre of popular fiction proceeds from the premise that a familiar public event occurred differently—for example, the South won the Civil War, Napoleon never met his Waterloo, the Spanish Armada conquered England—and extrapolates from there to depict the likely consequences of one dramatic change.

In more than twenty books of fiction published since his first collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959, Philip Roth has been more interested in examining the inner lives of fictional figures than in speculating about large historical contingencies. In The Counterlife(1986), Roth offers contradictory histories not of the Normandy Invasion but of his recurring character Nathan Zuckerman. When, in The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman encounters an Anne Frank who managed to survive the Holocaust, Roth is more intent on examining Zuckerman's personality than in pondering how different the world would have been if the Nazi genocide had been less thorough. Operation Shylock (1993) imagines alternative personal identities, two antagonistic characters each named Philip Roth. However, though the plot of The Plot Against America is refracted through the eyes of a boy named Philip Roth, this novel has its sights on broad historical developments. It asks the reader to accept the premise that Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator who became a national hero by flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.

Lindbergh is an isolationist and a Nazi sympathizer, and once he moves into the White House, the United States pursues cordial relations with Germany and does not enter World War II. American Jews, including Roth and his family, find themselves in an increasingly precarious position. A postscript to the novel reprints a speech that Lindbergh actually gave on September 11, 1941. Addressing a rally of the America First Committee in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh—who had visited Adolf Hitler and expressed admiration for him—noted that Jews wielded inordinate influence over the media and the government of the United States. He criticized them for pursuing parochial self-interest and pushing the country into war with Germany. By including Lindbergh's speech, along with verifiable information about public figures, including Lindbergh, Roosevelt, Walter Winchell, and Henry Ford, Roth encourages the reader to examine how he fictionalized history and to ponder the plausibility of his inventions. That it could indeed happen here is the implication of Roth's mingling of fabrication with verifiable facts.

The Plot Against America is Philip Roth's fictional memoir of a man named Philip Roth who recalls a crucial, fearful time in his childhood and in the history of his country. He evokes a generally happy household comprising his parents, his older brother, Sandy, and his orphaned cousin, Alvin, in Weequahic, a Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. When Metropolitan Life, the company that employs his father, Herman, offers to make him manager of a branch office in nearby Union, he declines rather than move the family to an area in which Jews are vastly outnumbered and profoundly disliked. During an outing to Washington, D.C., the Roths encounter blatant bigotry. Revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust would, a decade later, drive most anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States underground, but within the context of a society in which anti-Semitism is already widespread and widely accepted, the young Philip experiences persecution and pogroms as consequences of official policy. At seven, Philip is more concerned about his stamp collection than national politics. He becomes aware of Lindbergh's isolationist campaign and his electoral victory over the incumbent Roosevelt chiefly while listening with his family to the radio and while overhearing anxious conversations among adults.

For an American Jew growing up in a largely secular household, the growing threat of ethnic intolerance is brought home by members... (The entire section is 1691 words.) Get Free Access “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth - Salon.com Wednesday, Sep 29, 2004 8:00 PM UTC “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth In his most believable novel in years, Philip Roth imagines a 1940s America where Charles Lindbergh unseats FDR and the nation descends into vicious anti-Semitism. Topics: American History , Anti-Semitism , Books , Fiction , Philip Roth , World War II , Entertainment News When, in 2002, Philip Roth won the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the most august lifetime achievement award he’s likely to receive unless he’s called to Stockholm for a Nobel Prize, he devoted his acceptance speech to a long and cranky argument about his right to consider himself an American writer rather than a Jewish writer. This is Roth’s oldest gripe — that as an artist and a man he’s been subjected to unfair claims on his loyalty and identity.

And while it may seem regressive for a writer of Roth’s renown to be swatting away such ancient reproaches (does anybody still make them?), his ability to keep old grievances alive is what fuels him. All this makes Roth’s latest novel, “The Plot Against America,” doubly surprising. The book’s premise — what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism — is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel’s credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years. Roth’s feelings of persecution have been the engine of much of his fiction, and for his readers it’s always a complicated balancing act: Is the thrill of being swept up in his stormy wrath worth the suspension of common sense that’s often required?

The tirade about the Monica Lewinsky scandal that kicks off “The Human Stain,” for example, has a certain Swiftian magnificence, but as a description of what happened in America in 1998 it is dead wrong. The nation was not caught up in a puritanical witch hunt; rather, Americans largely refused to be whipped into such a frenzy, in defiance of the best efforts of right-wingers and certain media figures. (Wallowing in a gleefully smutty gossip-fest about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s private lives is another matter — that’s still going on, to judge from the covers of supermarket tabloids.) Sexual persecution is the specter that really winds Roth’s watch, but in an era of gay marriage and openly polyamorous households, it’s hard to find a situation in which a heterosexual male of conventional proclivities can feel truly ostracized as a result of his sexuality. As a result, Roth has had to contrive some pretty preposterous scenarios, populated by an assortment of straw-man oppressors, in order to maneuver his main characters into a position in which they can be unjustly tormented.

You can see all the strings and gears here, as in “The Human Stain,” in which Coleman Silk is given a wife solely so that she can be hounded unto death by a university’s administration and thus provide sufficient justification for Silk’s foaming hatred of that administration. With “The Plot Against America,” we’re asked to believe something far more dramatic: that our country could, under the right circumstances and under the influence of powerful demagogues, degenerate into hate-stoked rioting on the level of Nazi Germany’s notorious Kristallnacht. Yet — a dismal thought — this is more plausible than the propositions Roth has been presenting us with lately. Roth’s handling of the story is sober, considered and subdued, another surprise. Roth’s fire-and-brimstone eloquence has hypnotized many a reader who might, in a less persuasive fictional climate, reject the paranoid fantasies he concocts. Here, where the threat is real (however speculative the “history” may be), he has abandoned his fury. For “The Plot Against America” is a book about fear. “Fear” is the very first word in it, and for Roth fear is the natural companion of love, the secondary subject of the novel.

The book is a tribute to his parents, Herman and Bess, and the tender order and fierce integrity of the life they created for their two sons, Sandy and Philip, in mid-20th century Newark. Roth seems unaware of the vast and lively fictional genre of alternate history, but this novel belongs to the small subset of it that is less interested in the unfolding of global events than in the way those events affect the most intimate experiences of the people who live through them. From the moment Lindbergh offers himself as a Republican candidate opposed to intervention in the war in Europe, he becomes the villain of the Roth household.

This puts Herman at odds with such rich, assimilated Jews as Rabbi Bengelsdorf, a Newark macher renowned for his public speaking, horsemanship and “several books of inspirational poetry routinely given as gifts to bar mitzvah boys and newlyweds.” Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere: “‘Newark has the best drinking water in the world,’ the rabbi said, and said it as he would say everything, with deep consideration.” But while the desperate rabbis of Europe might have cooperated with the Nazis in hope of somehow lessening or managing the devastation awaiting their communities, Bengelsdorf is merely a fool. Like everyone else in the novel, he’s in thrall to a notion of America; the novel’s most ferocious battles ultimately boil down to a collision of contradictory Americas.

For the rabbi and his “wealthy, urbane, self-assured” friends, America is their own success story, in which they, the tiny first generation of Jews to attend Ivy League colleges, “mingled with the non-Jews, whom they subsequently associated with in communal, political and business endeavors and who sometimes appeared to accept them as equals.” To the Roths, America is the set of constitutional and governmental protections that allows them to live unmolested in Jewish neighborhoods. What they share with their neighbors is not a particularly Jewish culture but simply a blessed relief from the prejudice that, anywhere else, made them feel like outsiders. “It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion,” Roth writes — and there is a powerful sense that the neighborhood and family depictions here are largely autobiographical. “Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outside or in the houses.” Philip and his family know they are Jews, and that this threatens to set them apart (early in the novel, Herman rejects a promotion that would require moving to a gentile neighborhood), but they identify as Americans.

Philip, “steeped in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson,” revels in the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and finds the bearded stranger who goes door-to-door collecting donations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine bewildering. “We’d already had a homeland for three generations … Our homeland was America.” Lindbergh’s presidency splits the Roth family. Bess’ sister, Evelyn, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who is appointed by Lindbergh to direct the Office of American Absorption. They lure Philip’s older brother, Sandy, into an OAA program with the sinisterly wholesome title of Just Folks.

Just Folks sends urban children to heartland farms for the summer, with the ostensible aim of “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society.” Sandy becomes a partisan of Evelyn’s view that “the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was.” Sandy and the Bengelsdorfs are woefully mistaken about the ultimate ends of the OAA, but until its true nature emerges, they espouse many of the same ideas Roth himself has voiced. You could see “The Plot Against America” as an act of contrition, a concession allowing that the fears of his parents’ generation represented, if not a present reality, then at least a potential one. In other words, it can happen here. The Jews of Newark are always merely a step away from panic, dogged by “an atavistic sense of being undefended that had more to do with Kishinev and the pogroms of 1903 than with New Jersey 37 years later.” Previously, like Sandy, Roth called this paranoia. But in this novel, Newark’s Jews are not so terribly off the mark.

The young Philip Roth in “The Plot Against America” is a child who has soaked up the ambient fear around him and attached it to everything from the cellar (haunted, he thinks) to the cousin who returns from fighting with the Canadian army against Hitler minus a leg. He cherishes his stamp collection, which somehow comes to stand for all the American ideals he and his family are about to see shattered. (Later on, his mother will urge his father not to send a letter to the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who has become the most outspoken opponent of the Lindbergh administration, because someone might intercept it. “Never. Not the U.S. Mail,” Herman replies.) Philip has a recurring nightmare that his series of stamps showing national parks have been overprinted with swastikas, and that the presidents’ faces have been replaced with Hitler’s. Much of “The Plot Against America” consists of the child Philip’s relatively ordinary boyhood experiences — adventures with a mischievous friend, efforts to decipher the mysteries of the adult world, the slow revelation that his parents are mere human beings, and the trials of having to play with a geeky family friend, a boy to whom Philip will ultimately do a terrible wrong.

The voice is an adult’s, but not intrusively so. And meanwhile, underneath it all, the hum of menace grows louder and louder, until the disaster stalking Philip’s America becomes indistinguishable from the routine disasters of growing up, and then suddenly eclipses them. The novel’s hero is Herman Roth, an insurance salesman who lacks the killer instincts of his entrepreneurial brothers. This leaves him more vulnerable to the anti-Semitic machinations of the government, and sometimes the book feels like a defense of him to a younger version of Roth who mistakenly saw Herman as weak. The uncles and other Jewish businessmen in “The Plot Against America” crackle and leap from the page — the passages about them have the immediate feel of stories traded across the dining room table, full of rants and jokes and gestures, full of life. By contrast, the modest, industrious Herman might seem bland. The nightmare of the Lindbergh presidency becomes, for Roth the novelist, a way of applying a brutal pressure to his father and mother, an experiment that reveals, in extremis, their true worth. At the moment of greatest crisis, each of them is called upon to act, and each shows the clarity of genuine courage, mobilized by their most deeply held ideals.

“There were two kinds of strong men,” Roth writes, “those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinham, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.” But while “The Plot Against America” concedes (after a fashion; the book has a rather gratuitous “secret” revealed at the end) that the rise of a murderously anti-Semitic regime is possible, even in the U.S., it is not his Jewishness that spurs Herman Roth’s defiance of that regime, but his Americanness. Roth has not strayed so far from his old ways after all. To be Jews, for Herman and his friends, is “neither a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be ‘proud’ of.” It is rather “in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it.” To insist on a place in this country no matter what the “nature of things” might be, this, for Herman Roth, and eventually for his son Philip, is to be American. Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon.

She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com . The Plot Against America by by Philip Roth: Summary and reviews Reading Guide Book Summary This may be alternative history, but it is chillingly and convincingly realistic in its portrayal. The reader watches, horrified yet totally absorbed, as America spirals down the path toward fascism. When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty.

What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family  and for a million such families all over the country  during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. Chapter 1 June 1940October 1940 Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews. When the first shock came in June of 1940the nomination for the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's international aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphiamy father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for little more.

My mother who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the worst of the Depression by ... The Plot Against America: Amazon.co.uk: Philip Roth: 9780099478560: Books The Plot Against America Buy the selected items together This item:The Plot Against America by Philip Roth Paperback Â£8.99 In stock. Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) by Sinclair Lewis Paperback Â£8.21 In stock. Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.

Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Vintage; New Ed edition (6 Oct. 2005) Language: English Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description Amazon Review The Plot Against America is further affirmation of Philip Roths status as one of the most revered (and accomplished) of American novelists; another in a long line of highly impressive books that makes the days when he was know only for the masturbatory humour of Portnoy's Complaint seem every remote indeed. The new book is an astonishingly ambitious entry in the genre known as alternative history, and its re-imagining of a fascist America is as plausible and terrifying as previous alternative visions by such writers as Len Deighton and Kingsley Amis (not to mention the countless SF novelists such as Philip K Dick, progenitors of the genre, invariably irritated that their concepts are hijacked by more 'literary' novelists).

In The Plot Against America, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh (almost as well known for his admiration for Hitler as for the famous kidnapping of his baby) becomes President of the United States, and history takes a very different course. Roosevelt soundly defeated, Lindbergh inaugurates an isolationist, anti-war regime, as radical social change ensues; not least the growth of anti-Jewish feeling, fanned by the anti-Semitic Lindbergh. Roths Jewish protagonist, Philip, watches as his parents try to ignore the growing threat around them--initially, family holidays are ruined as hotel rooms become mysteriously unavailable, but soon deportation and worse is the order of the day. Ultimately, a fightback against the new US fascism is slowly engendered. All of this is handled with the mastery we now routinely expect from Roth, and both characterisation and plotting are structured with total assurance. All the historical detail is terrifyingly plausible, and the final sections (in which Roth reminds us what happened in the real America) seem no more persuasive than what weve just read. A visionary, turbulent work of literature.

--Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Detailed Review Summary of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth Philip Roth Booklist Philip Roth Message Board Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Plot Against America In "The Plot Against America," Roth returns to a pivotal point in American history, alters the outcome, and revises his life story accordingly. The crucial moment Roth selects is the presidential election of 1940: in Roth's fictionalized America, incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt loses to Charles Lindburgh. Roth constructs his novel around Lindburgh's political leanings, a side-note that textbooks generally play down. In "The Plot Against America," Lindburgh emerges as an anti-Semitic leader who conspires with Adolf Hitler and allies a democratic country with the Aryan politics of the Axis nations. In 1940, Philip Roth is a happy-go-lucky third-grader in Newark, New Jersey. Philip's 12-year-old brother, Sandy, is a budding artist. His father sells insurance; his mother is president of the PTA. The family lives peacefully in a predominantly middle-class neighborhood�and like the Roth family, their Newark neighborhood is largely Jewish.

When Lindburgh enters the White House, the Roth family's sense of security turns topsy-turvy. Lindburgh keeps the U.S. out of war�but at what expense? As newsreels slowly make their way across the Atlantic, the residents of Newark begin to see that Lindburgh's so-called "advocacy of peace" is really approval for Hitler's genocide of the Jewish people. Philip's 18-year-old cousin, Alvin, heads north, enlists with the Canadian commandos, and joins the war against Hitler. Sandy, meanwhile, is recruited by Just Folks, a program implemented by Lindburgh's newly established Office of American Absorption (OAA), to spend a summer on a Kentucky farm. Sandy's decision sparks the first of many tensions within the Roth family, as Mr. and Mrs. Roth grow increasingly suspicious of Lindburgh's motives. Alvin returns from the warfront without a leg, and Philip struggles to make sense of his rapidly changing world.

Suddenly, his once-heroic cousin is a handicapped veteran with anti-American affiliations; the man who was once nothing but a pilot is running the country; his once-peaceful parents are paranoid; and even Philip's once well-behaved big brother is fueling dinner-table feuds. When the 1944 election rolls around, Jewish radio-journalist Walter Winchell steps up to set the country back on track and anti-Lindburghers like Mr. and Mrs. Roth breathe a collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, things go from bearably bad to barely bearable when Winchell is assassinated and the OAA begins to transfer successful Jewish families to isolated, Christian towns. Fearing the worst, Mr. Roth quits his job as an insurance agent. Tensions continue to escalate when President Lindbergh disappears mysteriously, and riots break out across the nation. FDR is restored to power as Americans slowly gain awareness of Lindbergh's role in a Nazi plot to win world domination. In this way, Roth's novel moves through a somewhat different history to reach a very familiar present-- U.S. involvement in World War II, Hitler's defeat, and the preservation of democracy.

The review of this Book prepared by Tracie Amirante What did you like or hate about this book: Name: THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA | Philip Roth | First edition Advanced Search Roth, Philip. THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Octavo, boards. First edition. Alternate history novel of the U.S.A. in the 1940s under President Lindbergh. "Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974) won the 1940 presidential election. Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer and cooperated with Adolf Hitler. Roth called it “an American dystopia” [quoted in the TLS (December 23 & 30, 2005)]: 20." - Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1986-2009. Broderick and Di Filippo, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010 #76.

Lower spine end a bit soft, owner's name on front free endpaper, a near fine copy in fine dust jacket. (#118881). Price: $25.00 Heil to the Chief | The American Conservative Heil to the Chief Tweet Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is the novel that a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel. In 1940, as in 2004, voters faced a choiceless presidential election between pro-war interventionists, with a noble antiwar socialist (Norman Thomas then, Ralph Nader now) the best man in the field. In Roth’s what-if world, we the people have an actual choice in 1940. Instead of a third term for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, America Firster Charles Lindbergh is elected president, whereupon all hell breaks loose—which is to say America is at peace, a condition never again to be permitted, apparently, in the United States of Armaments. The horrific consequences of electing an antiwar Midwesterner are seen through the eyes of young Philip Roth, son of an insurance agent, and his Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey.

In our world, Wall Street operatives steered the 1940 GOP nomination to the hawkish utilities executive Wendell Willkie, as Gore Vidal describes with wit, artistry, and panache in The Golden Age (2000). That novel also pivots on the 1940 election, although Vidal regards Lindbergh as “the true white knight through and through,” and “the best that we are ever apt to produce in the hero line, American style.” Vidal is a proprietary patriot, utterly comfortable with our history because it is his history. Roth is ill at ease in the American past; his research seems to have consisted of a quick flip through the courtier histories of James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger. He bristles with contempt for the benighted denizens of “the working-class heartland of isolationist America”—that is, mothers and fathers who would rather not send their boys to die in foreign wars. Their parochial and pacific instincts point the way to a Middle American fascism. Roth writes in sodden cliches: for instance, FDR “inspired millions of ordinary families like ours to remain hopeful in the midst of hardship.” This is Time-Life prose.

There is not a felicitous sentence in this book; nor is there a spark of wit or a single subversive thought. The literary critics of the Department of Homeland Security will pronounce it fit for best-sellerdom. Charles A. Lindbergh was a classic product of Upper Midwest populism. His congressman father, a fierce foe of U.S. involvement in World War I, was dubbed the “Gopher Bolshevik” by the New York Times. Lindbergh is easily understood in a Minnesota tradition that stretches from the Gopher Bolshevik and Sen. Henrik Shipstead through Bob Dylan and Eugene McCarthy. He was no more a Nazi than FDR was. But not since the Spanish-American War have honorable Americans been permitted to criticize a war without being slandered as traitorous lackeys for the enemy. Just as Eugene V. Debs was calumnied as a Kaiser-lover and Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist, so must Charles Lindbergh be a crypto-Nazi. Given the current climate, Roth’s book is especially odious. Or perhaps The Plot Against America is meant to serve as the writing sample in Roth’s application for a speechwriter job in the Bush administration.

The Plot Against America is the sort of novel a bootlicking author might write to curry favor with a totalitarian government. The author puts a fictive gloss over the officially sanctioned history. Thank God things happened as they did! The alternative to the regime was madness, chaos, murder. Dissenters must be demonized, so Roth saddles his America First villains with positions exactly opposite those they actually took. The America First Committee was the largest (800,000 members) antiwar organization in U.S. history. Its members ranged from patricians to populists, from Main Street Republicans to prairie socialists. John F. Kennedy was a donor; his future brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was a founder, as were Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and Kingman Brewster. Many of the finest writers in America sympathized with (or joined) America First—Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Robinson Jeffers, e.e. cummings, and William Saroyan—while the leading pro-war authors were such toadies as Archibald MacLeish (or macarchibald maclapdog macleish, as cummings called him).

Aviator Lindbergh was the AFC’s most popular speaker, though he never formally joined the committee. The antiwar movement of 1940-41 was essentially libertarian: in favor of peace and civil liberties, opposed to conscription. Rather than accept this complexity, Roth opts for inversion: his isolationists are the party of repression and conscription, while his warhawks are the party of liberty. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. And so Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, running mate of “Fighting Bob” La Follette on the 1924 Progressive Party ticket and an early supporter of the New Deal who went into opposition over FDR’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court, emerges as Lindbergh’s wicked vice president, a despoiler of the Constitution and declarer of martial law. Never mind that the real Burton K. Wheeler was an anti-draft, antiwar, anti-big business defender of civil liberties: in Roth’s world, this great American—a “brilliant, incorruptible, courageous man,” in La Follette’s glowing tribute—must be depicted as pro-fascist.

(The closest thing to a real live fascist in American politics in 1940 was FDR brain-truster Rexford G. Tugwell.) Vice President Wheeler is portrayed as a “combative” snarler whose job is to “attack and revile” foes—a role actually played by Rothian hero Harold Ickes, the FDR hatchetman so memorably described by Clare Boothe Luce as having “the soul of a meat axe and the mind of a commissar.” Roth’s Lindbergh is laconic to the point of simplemindedness. The real Lindy was a fine writer who composed his own speeches, but Roth suggests that these were written in Germany. The Lindbergh of The Plot Against America declares, “My intention in running for the presidency is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It’s not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s between Lindbergh and war.” This is an eminently fair summation.

But of course the American people were presented no such choice in 1940, nor really in any other quadrennium since World War II except, perhaps, 1972. The Lindbergh nomination is engineered by North Dakota Sen. Gerald P. Nye, whom Roth dismisses with the lazy adjective “right-wing.” Oh really? In fact, Nye criticized the New Deal from the Left for its timorousness. Nye had made his name as the scourge of the “merchants of death” who profited from the disastrous U.S. entry into the First World War, and he always feared a replay. Campaigning in “the remotest rural counties,” Lindbergh wins in a landslide, the Republicans take Congress, and the threat of peace, no conscription, and full enjoyment of the Bill of Rights darkens the Rothian sky. To young Philip’s parents, America is good only insofar as it sends its sons to die in foreign lands. The family’s favorite presidents are Wilson and FDR, who shipped more Americans to die overseas than any other chief execs.

Unwashed Americans, who live in places like North Dakota or Minnesota or Montana, mean harm to the Roths; their reluctance to send their sons to transatlantic graves is presented as a particularly insidious symptom of anti-Semitism. In Roth’s flip-flopped universe, President Lindbergh institutes a peacetime draft—which in fact FDR did, over the ardent objections of the isolationists, who argued against conscription on libertarian grounds. President Lindbergh cozies up to the Nazis while pursuing a domestic policy that might be stamped “Made in Germany.” He is wildly popular, even with “the highly assimilated upper echelon of German Jewish society,” whose cultured members are depicted herein as craven social climbers. Among the turncoat Jews is Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark, a South Carolina native with a “courtly Southern accent”—always the tip-off to knavery when a mediocrity is at the typewriter. The Rabbi opposes women’s suffrage, not exactly a hot topic in 1940, but then Roth is limning character, don’t you see? The scene in which Rabbi Bengelsdorf vivisects FDR’s Scottie Fala must have been excised by a wise editor.

Lindbergh and Rabbi Bengelsdorf create an Office of American Absorption, whose centerpiece is the “Just Folks” program, under which Jewish youth are shipped out to the “Gentile heartland” to become real Amerrykuns. Philip’s brother spends the summer with a “Kentucky tobacco farmer.” He returns with an accent, respect for farm life, a taste for ham and bacon, and a dose of the fascist clap that Philip Roth imagines lurks everywhere in that darksome forest of fear west of the Hudson. To Roth, a small farm in Kentucky is the perfect training ground for a fascist. Tell it to Wendell Berry, Philip. “Just Folks” is yet another Roth reversal: FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps was the actual (if benign) means of rusticating urban boys in the 1930s. In the 1940s, it was urban politicians who tore rural boys from their native ground and sent them to war. The dislocating effects of militarism meant that 15 million Americans lived in a different county in March 1945 than they had in December 1941—and that doesn’t count the 12 million-plus in uniform.

A disproportionate number of the displaced, by the way, were from Kentucky. As an anti-hillbilly joke of the time went, America lost three states in the early 1940s: Kentucky and Tennessee had gone to Indiana, and Indiana had gone to hell. But to Roth, the Gentile heartland is hell. If The Plot Against America sounds like Roth’s savage satire on Jewish paranoia, it is not. For the rural folk eventually run riot as a kind of cornfed, baccy-smokin’ Khmer Rouge. Under the Office of American Absorption, Metropolitan Life offers Philip’s father a transfer to Danville, Kentucky. He refuses, probably because novelist Roth has no idea how to describe life in a Klan-Nazi hotbed like Kentucky, but it is in resisting relocation that the Roth family attains a certain nobility. “A child of my background had a sixth sense in those days, the geographic sense, the sharp sense of where he lived and who and what surrounded him,” writes Roth. The faces, the voices, the ejaculations (because, after all, this is Philip Roth): these people are Newark, and we are made to understand the enormity of their unmooring.

Dislocation exacts a terrible human cost. A pity that Roth does not mind uprooting the hicks he so obviously hates—for war is the most pitiless uprooter of all. In the real 1940-41, antiwar entertainers were blacklisted for daring to speak their minds. (The case of Lillian Gish was notably disgusting.) In Roth’s world, the pro-war radio gossip Walter Winchell is fired by Jergens Lotion when he denounces President Lindbergh. Winchell then declares his candidacy for president and barnstorms the black heart of America. He is baited and mocked in South Boston, Little Italy, and wherever papist brutes foregather. (In fact, it was America First speakers who were harassed in 1941, heckled by warhawks and denied permits in jingo towns.) It is here that Roth’s loathing of Catholicism, with its “witchy” nuns and “creepily morticianlike priests,” reaches a fever-swamp pitch.

Winchell’s taunting of the antiwar wafer-eaters brings “the Lindbergh grotesquery to the surface.” He is assaulted in South Boston and greeted with chants of “Kike Go Home!” in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest—all sewers “notorious for their bigotry.” Working-class Catholics erupt in anti-Semitic riots in Detroit: “shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited” on the lawns of Jewish homeowners. Jewish schools are bombed and synagogues trashed in America’s first-ever pogrom. Anti-Jewish riots also break out in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Akron, Syracuse—all across the hate-filled heartland, for the “menace of anti-Semitism” stretches “from one end of America to the other.” Our heroes make a mad dash across “rural West Virginia,” where “Ku Klux Klansmen had to be lying in wait for any Jew foolhardy enough to be driving through.” Almost Heaven? Not in this book.

Walter Winchell is killed in Kentucky by “an American Nazi Party assassin working in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan.” Roth takes an especial scunner to poor Kentucky, his locus of American evil. A Jewish lady from Newark, exiled to Danville, is set upon by a mob of Klansmen, which is to say ordinary Kentuckians; she is beaten and burned to death in the state that provides “a nightmarish vision of America’s anti-Semitic fury.” To add insult to fatal injury, her son, “the smartest kid in our class” in Newark, is “stunted” and mentally “stopped” by his exposure to the aments of Kaintuck. Coincidentally, I slogged through Roth right after reading three Kentucky novels: Berry’s Watch With Me (1994), James Still’s River of Earth (1940), and The Time of Man (1926) by Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Each is set within a decade or two of 1940. The characters are remarkably unlike Nazis, though perhaps Mr. Roth knows the true heart of Kentucky better than Kentuckians themselves.

The Winchell funeral is the winch that turns the cranks out of office. Lindy disappears in flight, probably a victim of the Nazis who orchestrated the antiwar movement all along. (Just as Saddam Hussein’s hidden bank accounts are enriching today’s peace movement.) Acting President Wheeler declares martial law—quite a trick for a civil libertarian to pull off—anti-Semitic riots stain America red with the blood of Jewish martyrs, till FDR comes out of retirement … oh, I don’t want to spoil the ending for you. Suffice to say that Roth, in his dotage, displays all the imagination of an assistant censor in the Office of War Information. Franklin D. retakes the White House and promptly gets us into the world war, wherein all those louts from Kentucky either die as fodder or walk tall as members of the Greatest Generation. All’s well that ends well. This is a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping with hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has ever dared stand against the war machine. All that is left, I suppose, is for the author to collect his Presidential Medal of Freedom.

_______________________________________________ Bill Kauffman’s most recent book is Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt/Picador). His earlier books include America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics and the novel Every Man a King. MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR The Plot Against America - Philip Roth The Plot Against America Includes A True Chronology of the Major Figures, and other documentation - Return to top of the page - Our Assessment: The NY Rev. of Books . Evelyn Finger Review Consensus: Many very, very impressed, but not quite a consensus -- and many disappointed by the historical resolution Roth chooses From the Reviews: "Insecurity saturates The Plot Against America. Unfortunately, the saturation goes right down to the level of its telling. For a writer blessed with the eyes and ears to find real life fantastic in every detail, fantasy is the wrong form. (...) Roth does a pretty good job of spoiling the story himself, by dishing out improbabilities with shameless haste; if it were not for the quality of the writing, you could be reading The Da Vinci Code. Luckily for the reader's mental health, Roth is no more capable of an uninteresting sentence than Dan Brown is capable of an interesting one.

(...) It's an understandable bad dream. But it hasn't led to a good book, and couldn't have." - Clive James, The Atlantic Monthly "The result is a cautionary story in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, a stunning work of political extrapolation about a triumvirate of hate, ignorance, and paranoia that shreds decency and overruns liberty. Roth provides brilliant analysis of political rhetoric: the way demagogues manipulate public opinion and the way responsible journalists inadvertently prop up tyrants in their devotion to objectivity and balance. But what really gives the novel life is its narrator: a little boy named Phil Roth." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor "Roth's lack of conviction about his own central plot device is palpable throughout. Most of the actual fright that occurs in the novel is caused by the kind of domestic violence that has nothing to do with government provocation (.....) The danger it points up is not the danger it describes; the danger it points up is of political infantilization." - Ruth Wisse, Commentary "Admittedly, the book's historical aspects can seem thin and preposterous, especially the book's final twist, which allows Roosevelt back into office.

Yet this matters much less than the description of how history can encroach upon an ordinary family, and how simple survival becomes an instance of heroism." - The Economist "But with this fascinating, fertile material, Roth has spun an unconvincing fantasy that falls far short of his finest work. While his depictions of the Roth family's idyllic pre-Lindbergh existence (and Philip's vibrant, eccentric inner life) are detailed and persuasive, he has set them against a cardboard backdrop of a fatally underimagined alternative America." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly "The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism and with a quotidian attentiveness to sights and sounds, tastes and smells, surnames and nicknames and brandnames -- an accumulation of des petits faits vrais -- that dissolves any residual disbelief." - Blake Morrison, The Guardian "Perhaps as the book moved towards its inevitable end a certain reticence overtook Roth. How dare he match his make-believe against the great testimonies of his friends, Primo Levi and Aharon Appelfeld, who had experienced what he was only imagining?

Anyway, Roth stayed his hand, practised what feels like self-censorship, and yanked history back on course - and thereby dampening the fires of his inspiration. Good for his character, good for the Jews, but not so good for the book. Tastefulness is not Roth's forte." - Clive Sinclair, The Independent "It is weakest when the bigger national narrative -- the story of the Lindbergh administration -- and the smaller family narrative fail to mesh. Towards the end -- which feels rushed -- Roth almost gives up trying to integrate the two. (...) Like all Roth's fiction, this novel is dazzling but flawed. Roth has made the strange decision to undercut the dramatic tension inherent within his own story. (...) But it would be ridiculous to grumble. Philip Roth with flaws is still the most exciting novelist writing today." - Johann Hari, Independent on Sunday "I called the book 'astonishing', but what astonishes is not this wild counter-history -- it is presented too plausibly for that -- or any fireworks in the prose, which is uncommonly sober, though always elegant.

What's astonishing is the way Roth puts together the stories of the shaken Jewish family and an America that can't see what's happening to it, that isn't shaken enough. (...) But what's astonishing is still the quiet domesticity of the story and its telling." - Michael Wood, London Review of Books "One of the achievements of The Plot Against America is showing how fear slowly infects the very weather of one's life, tightening each swallow of breath." - James Wolcott, The Nation "The real shame is that the successful parts of the book, the intimate, are mired in this swamp of ugly fairy tale, the public. By creating a public history so far-fetched, and then failing to deliver it in any believable way, the small portraits are disconnected from the movement of the book. The intimate portraits of families and people are left to float like vignettes in a context we can never quite bring ourselves to buy." - Max Watman, The New Criterion "The novel is unashamedly nostalgic -- and this is the pleasure of it, for both writer and reader. (...) The Plot Against America is, in many ways, an unsatisfactory book: not quite fiction and not quite believable.

There are too many long, dull explicatory passages of historical narrative -- a kind of elaborate scene-setting. It is Roth at his most benign and forgiving, of his parents, of his extended family, and of his tortured relationship with his own Jewishness. Roth the hectoring raconteur, the stand-up comedian, the tyrannical monologist is absent." - Jason Cowley, New Statesman "Roth�s Holocaust novel becomes something like a Holocaust anti-novel, where the crucial point appears to be that what�s happening on the page has never actually happened in life." - Keith Gessen, New York "It needs a paranoid reader to turn it into a roman à clef for the present. However, one of the things that The Plot Against America is about is, precisely, paranoia." - J.M.Coetzee, The New York Review of Books "(P)rovocative but lumpy (.....) In the end, this novel tries to link the personal concerns of so much of Mr. Roth's early fiction with the sweeping, historical tableau of his American trilogy.

If the telescope turned on America in this novel sorely lacks the verisimilitude and keen social observation found in American Pastoral and The Human Stain, the microscope it turns on the Roths still provides an intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible. (...) Roth has found his way to an archetypal nightmare -- the anxious, ancestral, midnight fear of the American Jews. This, finally, is the rumbling engine that keeps The Plot Against America securely aloft and chugging forward -- the emotion that Roth has allowed himself to feel, luxuriously and at length." - Paul Berman, The New York Times Book Review "One of the glories of the book is its counterpoint of large and small, its zooming back and forth, from chapter to chapter, between world events and the reactions to them in the Roth household.

(...) (S)inuous and brilliant" - Joan Acocella, The New Yorker "But for the first 300 pages -- on page 301 he suddenly, almost perversely, gives his story what seems a radically wrong turn -- The Plot Against America is too ingeniously excruciating to put down." - David Gates, Newsweek "It's a curious fizzling of a bold enterprise. There seems no need, in this genre of fiction, to return to the starting point, no advantage to be gained by doing so. Once people's hidden hatreds are legitimised by the authorities, anything can happen. Isn't that the whole point ? It's the novelist's job to follow his speculations to their furthest point -- hardly a task that Roth has shirked in the past.

It almost amounts to a retraction, to an acknowledgement that American history as we have known it has some magnetic integrity, so that his imagination can wrench it out of true only on a temporary basis." - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer "What gives this story its feverish poignancy -- even beauty -- is that these events are recorded through the eyes of the author as a child as he tries to fathom the collapse of his innocent world. It may sound loony to say this is Roth's To Kill a Mockingbird." - Tom Gliatto, People "All of this is nothing if not entertaining. But in the end, entertaining is all it is, even though the foregrounded Roth family drama is as psychologically acute as anything in the author�s work -- a horribly plausible account of children and parents coping with encroaching political doom. The artfulness is only amplified by the author�s decision to unspool the entire novel through a seven-year-old�s eyes, which robs Roth of his usual libidinous avenue into the consciousness of his characters." - Ross Douthat, Policy Review "What readers will discover, however, is Roth's most powerful work to date.

Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly -- terrifyingly -- believable, The Plot Against America is an exercise in speculative history that becomes speculation itself. After all, Roth says, they're really the same thing" - Daniel Handler, San Francisco Chronicle "The Plot Against America collides autobiography with speculative history, and the history comes off worse. (...) Roth is superb as ever on the ferocious, kitchen-table disputes and the half-lies of family life. But the "history" wears us down. We are force-fed great chunks of expository prose that aren't quite in the register of the boy then nor of the man now (.....) The Plot Against America is a minor addition to the Roth canon, but is none the less welcome. Roth's lesser works are better than many others' masterpieces." - David Flusfeder, The Telegraph "Harmonising this witty but sombre fantasy with the naturalistic foreground was clearly a challenge; I'd say Roth pulls it off. As you'd expect, the issues raised aren't treated simplistically, and Roth contrives ambiguous fates for several key cast members.

Better put together than The Human Stain, The Plot Against America is another frighteningly intense performance from a novelist in his early 70s." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph "Page by page it is never less than alive. Yet it does not -- once past its initial, one-sentence high concept -- have quite the jaw-dropping effect of Roth�s other late novels, and this may, paradoxically, be an effect of the subject itself. For though Roth often works by making us shake our heads in disbelief, this book demands the very opposite." - Michael Gorra, Times Literary Supplement "The writing is brilliant when the focus is on the Roths and their neighborhood and what it meant to be a working-class Jew when there were more Jewish gangsters than rich Jews. But Roth lapses into melodrama when he tries to tie up all the loose ends in such a hurry that he fails to explain how another presidential election was held in 1942." - Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today "It may be the saddest book Roth has written and the most frightening." - Gabriel Brownstein, The Village Voice "What does this all add up to ? Less than one would have hoped.

The gap between the larger world of President Lindbergh and young Phil's narration in Newark is simply too vast to bridge. And the spiraling implausibility of the plot breaks faith with the reader." - Thomas Fleming, Wall Street Journal "(H)uge, inflammatory, painfully moving (.....) It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined. (...) That Roth has written The Plot Against America in some respects as a parable for our times seems to me inescapably and rather regrettably true." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "Im Kern handelt dieser Roman nicht von Charles Lindbergh, nicht vom "German Bund", nicht von den Nazis und nicht vom Ku-Klux-Klan.

Er handelt von den komplizierten, neurotischen Menschen, die von diesen Mächten als Opfer auserkoren wurden." - Hannes Stein, Die Welt "Schade, dass Roth dieses radikal desillusionistische Buch am Ende durch seine Mutlosigkeit ruiniert." - Evelyn Finger, Die Zeit Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. - Return to top of the page - The complete review 's Review: The Plot Against America envisions history taking a slightly different turn between 1940 and 1942. The events are recounted as seen through the eyes of 'Philip Roth', just seven years old when the events described in the book begin to unfold, living with his family in a Jewish neighbourhood in Newark.

The novel imagines Charles Lindbergh running against and defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 American presidential elections on a platform promising to keep the United States out of the World War ("Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war", as he succinctly puts the choice). His pro-German and arguably anti-Semitic leanings are cause for great concern in the Roth household (and among Jews generally), and the book chronicles the slow transformation of the nation around them in those years. Philip's father, an insurance agent, is outraged and deeply concerned by the rise of Lindbergh, but continues to have some faith in the democratic institutions that made America great. The family does make some contingency plans -- like opening a bank account in Canada, so that they would have some money there if they felt they had to flee (as a few other Jewish families do early on) -- but otherwise try to lead pretty much the same life as usual. The younger generation reacts in a variety of ways: Philip's cousin Alvin, who lived with the Roths for several years, goes to Canada to fight on the Allied side in Europe (with tragic results).

Philip's older brother, Sandy -- twelve in 1940 -- is co-opted by the regime, unwilling to believe it is bad and seeing opportunities that he eagerly embraces. And there's also Philip's aunt, his mother's sister, Evelyn, who gets involved (and eventually marries) Lindbergh's court-Jew, Rabbi Bengelsdorf. Bengelsdorf is responsible for the Office of American Absorbtion, "inviting Jews to enter as far into the national life as they like". Sandy gets to spend a summer on a Kentucky farm through the programme, but his father remains deeply suspicious of both the motives and the methods of the administration. It certainly looks like a slippery slope, as it doesn't take too long before the father is offered an 'opportunity' to move the family from Newark to the heartland permanently ..... The Plot Against America offers a neat, creepy alternate-history. Philip's largely innocent eyes see only some of what is happening -- an effective way of conveying sweeping political changes and history-in-the-making that, in its detail, could be overwhelming.

He is not a naïve narrator -- the book is written from a mature, knowing perspective that does fill in some of the detail that the child of the time could not have understood -- but allowing him to recount the story makes it a personal one, and it is the family-detail, the domestic disputes and concerns, that give the book a particularly convincing feel. Roth is also particularly good at capturing the child's confusion and impotence -- and his reactions, as when he tries to run away or escape, or how he interprets the actions of his elders. (An odd choice is the occasional mention of events that occur decades later -- what became of Alvin, for example, or a brief mention of Robert Kennedy's assasination on 4 June, 1968.

It is an awkward form of reassurance from relatively early on that, even if things do not exactly turn out well (RFK still gets shot), the reader knows there will be a return to normalcy or at least to the familiar, that the nightmare unfolding on these pages will be of limited duration and effect.) For a long time Sandy can still believe: "But nothing is happening in America, nothing", but eventually his father is proved right: the country has changed, very much for the worse. A political challenge to Lindbergh leads to an assassination, and then suddenly all hell breaks loose. And it's here that the book takes a very odd turn, recounting the events of those fateful days in summary-descriptions 'Drawn from the Archives of Newark's Newsreel Theater', a day-by-day account of the catastrophe and then deliverance. Rushed, it doesn't have the same plausibility as the rest of the so carefully built-up book (and in the final possible explanation that's then offered sounds almost entirely unbelievable). Roth takes readers close to the abyss, but then pulls them back from it with a hard jerk.

The fable and its moral (it could happen here) are undermined by his unwillingness to really consider it; good triumphs over evil so quickly, easily, and almost arbitrarily that the reader doesn't know what to believe any longer. The sense is that Roth simply became afraid of what he had posited, that it hit too close to home, and too hard, and so he shied away from it. Young Philip claims innocence was lost -- "never would I be able to revive that unfazed sense of security first fostered in a little child by a big, protective republic and his ferociously responsible parents" -- but that almost seems the only price that was paid (and it seems almost trivial, a slightly more dramatic (but not extraordinarily traumatic) coming of age story than most). There was much more to explore here, and for quite a while Roth seemed willing to undertake that task -- before ultimately turning tail. Exceptionally well written, The Plot Against America is an always gripping read. An excellent portrait of a family in troubled times, its main weaknesses lie in how it treats the genie it lets out of the bottle.

Roth has the excuse of the young child's perspective to explain some of the superficiality of the book -- blacks, for example, practically don't figure at all in the book and the racism (and laws) against that group are essentially completely ignored, the book generally limited to a specifically Jewish slice of life. And the quick historical turnaround is particularly less than convincing, and at odds with the rest of the book. In backing off so suddenly from the explosive subject matter, The Plot Against America is a bit of a disappointment, but it is still an exceptional book. Certainly recommended. - Return to top of the page -

Question: Who won the 1940 Presidential election in the Philip Roth novel 'The Plot Against America'?
Answer: CHARLES LINDBERGH