A Reminder of Why Writers Should Aspire to Greatness

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	• The Plot Against America Philip Roth Vintage, 2005 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 389 reviews view larger image
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A Reminder of Why Writers Should Aspire to Greatness

I won't rehash the plot of Roth's brilliant diversion of American history, or belabor his point, which I think is that things like the Bush Administration and the Iraq War happen because we forget the lessons we should have learned from history, or forget to pay attention to history and its possibilities. This point is made, but how it is made is the work of genius here. The Plot Against America is a beautifully rendered piece of fiction. Of course it's no secret that Roth's wordcraft is in the upper of the upper echelon of American writers. His humor and warmth, which endear you to characters for life, can turn to horror and fear so quickly you desperately hope that the characters you love will survive the novel's day. This is the kind of novel that should make all writers want to write better. The story is poignant, as mentioned, heartfelt, as it is based on Roth's own family, and compelling in a way I did not expect. Roth's statements about anti-Semitism and fascism are not new, but the way he puts a human face on anti-Semitism is to show its effect on one family, and not just as victims but as participants as well. The reader is completely drawn into the Roth family, in fact you become a member of the family, privy to its secrets, desires, fears, and joys, and each day of the alternate history brings more surprises and anxiety as you seek to know how and if the Roths will survive. Most powerful of all is the realization that despite any ethnicity we try to cling to, in this country we're all Americans, a bunch of mutts who survive and thrive because we are mutts, and yet if we aren't vigilant about avoiding group-think, and letting ourselves be led by cloying manipulative declarations of patriotism and disingenuous flag-waving, we can let ignorance turn us into a hateful mob in a day. Roth points out well the inherent problems with America, but he also more forcefully celebrates what it truly means to be an American. This novel will stand as one of the great works of literature, and because it is a bit outside many of his usual themes, perhaps the most memorable book in Roth's spectacular oeuvre.

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What If It Did Happen Here?

Philip Roth imagines a time in history if Charles Lindbergh had won the Presidency. Anti-Semitism grows in America, creating two separate cultures. Brilliantly evoked, Roth follows the journey of one American Jewish family as they see America changing before their eyes. Thought provoking. Frightening.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

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Lesser Roth

Roth's best history has been done when he has confronted his American characters or imagined other selves with incarnations from doomed Europe: as in The Ghost Writer (1979), where Nathan Zuckerman meets a hysterical version of Anne Frank; or in a story from 1973, where the kindly but ridiculous Dr Kafka teaches Hebrew in post-war Newark and is an unsatisfactory suitor to Philip's aunt Rhoda. These confrontations take place on a dizzying number of levels of irony, most of which aren't present in "Lindbergh's peacetime America, the autonomous fortress oceans away from the world's war zones where no one is in jeopardy except us". This lack of jeopardy is one of the problems with the book. A sensitive child's apprehensions in an uneasy USA are not much of a match for what was going on in the Europe of 1941 and 1942. Over Roth's invention of a Jewish police force or his brother Sandy's derision of the "frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews" of Newark looms our knowledge of what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw, for example, without threatening our understanding of those actual events or alleviating our impatience with his invented ones. Roth raises an unlikely public hero in Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist; after his opposition to Lindbergh ends in martyrdom in 1942, history resumes as before: the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt returns, and familiar history is resumed. Philip Roth can grow up to become Philip Roth. Herman has won the war. 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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history.
In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial ?understanding? with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh?s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America?and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

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