I first read a Philip Roth novel while I was in college. It was Portnoy's Complaint and I did not enjoy it. After reading a few more of his books over the past year, I am anxious to go back and re-read Portnoy's. I am beginning to suspect I lacked the worldview to understand it properly at the time. With the deaths of Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut in recent years, Roth is arguably the most important American novelist left of his generation. His output over the past ten or twelve years has been prodigious and, at age 75, he has a new novel, Indignation, released this past week.
The Plot Against America combines great story-telling with 'What If' history and is a very compelling novel. Nobody who has read Roth before will be surprised that the setting is Newark in the 1940s, or that the narrator's name is, well, Philip Roth. Most of Roth's work has some elements of autobiography and it is not the first time he has inserted a character with his own name into the proceedings. In this alternate telling of history, the aviator and national hero Charles Lindbergh has run successfully for the presidency of the United States, defeating Roosevelt on a platform of isolationism, effectively keeping the United States out of World War II. Lindbergh, in fact, was an avid isolationist, and spoke forcefully on the matter many times. In Roth's alternate tale, Lindbergh's Nazi sympathies and tacit agreements with Hitler slowly begin to erode the quality of life and civil liberties of America's Jewish citizens, including the Roth family. What makes the book so compelling is that Roth presents an alternate history that is not difficult to believe would happen if the right circumstances existed. In addition, the forced migrations, attempts to integrate Jews into mainstream middle America, and the lynchings of some dissenters are eerily similar to real fates that befell American Indians and African Americans in the earlier parts of the last century.
This novel is an excellent starting point for Roth if you haven't read any of his work. It was hard to put this one down.
2 comments:
I felt like this book was quite different--much more engaging, for me--than the other Roth I've read. I do enjoy alternative history, and I feel like the framework really helps lend urgency to the characters' struggles. I read one review of it that read the novel as a vindication of his parents--in his other books, they are always needlessly anxious and fretful, and in this one, they are completely justified in their fearfulness. (I haven't read enough of his other stuff to agree or not, I just thought it was an interesting point.)
Great point about his parents. They definitely come of in a much more positive (and even heroic) light in this book than Rothian parents are typically portrayed. An event like this happening obviously would have borne out the paranoia I'm sure many felt when Lindbergh, who was as close to a rock star as the era had, was saying so many uncomfortable things.
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