The Plot Against America

Principal characters:

Phillip Roth
Sandy Roth
Mr. and Mrs. Roth
Alvin Roth
Rabbi Bengelsdorf
Uncle Marti
Aunt Evelyn
Seldon

Lindbergh

Like many things about which I know nothing, Judaism fascinates me. I want to believe that in a different incarnation I grew up the uncouth, street-smart son of secular New York Jewish parents who worked long days in an almost Kosher deli and lived in a modest red-brick Brooklyn apartment. In this strange dream, our domestic bliss is punctuated only by my all-too-regular encounters with the limits of the law.

Why do I desire this? I suspect that the answer has something to do with my native sympathies for groups that are marginal, colorful, or both. I distinctly remember that in the sixth grade I desperately wanted to swap places with Jerome, the funny-as-hell black kid whose dad worked at the power plant on the outskirts of Shandon. Jerome was faster, smarter, and funnier than any of the rest of us, but that wasn’t why I wanted to be Jerome. My interest sprang from something a little more twisted, perhaps my father’s indelicate jokes, snide comments about black people that to my tender ears drifted dangerously close to racism. I wanted to be Jerome in order to be the man whose mere personal excellence could assume moral and political dimensions, the man who could trigger conceptual shift by being the specific thing that didn’t fit the mold. My destiny as a privileged white kid came without a worthy mold to break.

Phillip Roth’s book about a hypothetical Roth subject to the slings and arrows of an alternative history is not a book about longing to be something else. It is a book about the fear that goes with being the thing itself. Whimsical wandering through the rich catalogue of possible identities is a fine game, but what to make of a history in which men have forcibly denied this pleasure to a huge but arbitrary subgroup of the population? What to make of the fact that there is grisly historical evidence that this youthful sense of personal invention can be institutionally snubbed out, erased with a government decree that member of group X are henceforth and in perpetuity only members of group X and thus will die? Identity angst would strike any sane member of that group, no matter how many miles separated them from the offending regime.

This book tells the fictional tale of America’s brush with Nazi fascism. It begins with Lindberg’s landslide victory over FDR in the US presidential election of 1940, passes through the subtle but inevitable rise in anti-semitism, the evolution of race politics, the birth of neighborly distrust, and concludes with Lindberg’s disappearance and the resumption of democratic sanity. Although the novel ends with a resumption of what we consider ‘normal America’, open, tolerant, fair, it makes this ending seem, in certain ways, a freak happenstance, and thus profoundly problematizes the basic democratic checks we take for granted. This is interesting in its own right, but the novel’s real strength lies in it characters, all of whom are vividly drawn and carefully developed. What is interesting, perhaps, is that in spite of their basic likeability, the characters never quite seem like anyone you’d meet in real life. They engage us, they are substantive enough to coax our consent, but their interior lives seem muted. One has the sense that for Roth, the character of a character is told as much by how he ends up as by what he thinks or feels. He eschews the elaborate interiority of a James, for example, and instead focuses on story telling that holds its emotional interest through the integration of telling external details.

The book was lovely. I immediately gave it to Andrew, but will set about expanding my Roth collection directly.