The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

Phillip Roth is one of the superstars of American literature. He's won just about every award possible, many of them twice. His books are routinely best-sellers. He has the type of broad appeal that gets him taught in college courses as well as read by "common readers." He is old, which gives him the gravitas of an elder literary stateman, yet he still publishes high-qualityh work fairly often, his last book came out in late 2007, which indicates that his powers are still potent.

I know a little about Roth. I studied his autobiography as an undergraduate and included an extensive analysis of it in my undergraduate thesis. Very purposefully I tried not to know much of his fictional work. I wanted to focus on his life and his presentation of his life. Of course, someone might have told me that I couldn't have picked a more elusive author for my attempt. Roth's life in many way is bound up with his fiction. He has made a career out of playing with the distinction between the two and confusing critics, fans, and students along the way. For example, he has written nine books on a character named Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman starts out as a young aspiring writer, much as Roth was a young aspiring writer at the time his first Zuckerman book was published. Over the years, Zuckerman has found some literary fame, had many romantic foibles, and even taught college courses. Not so surprisingly, Roth's life features an incredible number of similar chapters. However, when there seemed to be too many parallels, Roth wrote Zuckerman into situations that were very obviously not autobiographical. Once I figured out the complicated dance that was his life and his work, I walked away. To gain critical distance, but also because I was annoyed and fascinated at the same time, and I didn't have the time to read all his novels. Also, I wasn't entranced by his writing. It was very solid and polished. But it didn't move me the way that Hunter Thompson or Laurie R. King did. Still doesn't.

So after a significant Roth hiatus, I got interested in The Plot Against America. I read the reviews when it first came out and it looked intriguing. I had been interested in Connie Willis at the time, one of the grand dame's of American science-fiction who happened to live in the small town where I went to college and frequented the coffee shop where I did most of my reading and writing. Willis is classified as a sci-fi writer and her books do fit that mold. But she uses sci-fi primarily as a tool to get her where she wants to be. She is really a writer of histories, romances, and the very literary human condition. But she used the sci-fi tool early on and the label stuck. To her credit, she embraces the label and has had unparalleled success. The Plot Against America reminds me a lot of Connie Willis's work. Roth rewrites 1940's U.S. history. He posits that pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election against incumbant Franklin D. Roosevelt and begins a mysterious reign as the elusive anti-semitic president of isolationist America. He tells the story from the eyes of young Phillip Roth, an adolescent growing up in suburban New Jersey. Heady stuff.

The prose is passable and the pyscho-drama is a bit much, but Roth manages to do two things rather brilliantly. First, he creates the mood of a growing, nationally sponsored anti-semitism that is scarily believable. He doesn't hit you over the head with it. Instead, he builds it slowly but inexorably, so much so that sometimes it seems as tangible as mist while at others your heart begins to pound. I couldn 't help but think that the characters may have sounded eerily like Jews in Germany during the late 20's and 30's. Roth's Jewish community spends a lot of time in disbelief, echoing things like "This can't really be happening here and now. Can it? This is America after all." But happen it does, and the parallels with early German anti-semitic activity is all the more shocking. The realism of it all is even more powerful. Roth, the author, creates a socio-historical milieu that is entirely believable and peoples it with the type of folks that we all know. And if you get caught up in the narrative, as I did, then you too might begin to think things like "That couldn't really happen. Could it? After all, it's America, isn't it?" Which is exactly what Roth is going for and exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930's. It's powerful stuff for an alternate timeline sci-fi style book.

The second thing that Roth does well is to recreate the psyche of a pre-pubescent boy. Perhaps the feat isn't all that amazing given that he seems to have rewritten his own pysche, but then you are forced to ask yourself, "Where does the fiction end and the memoir begin?" The book is fiction, right? I mean, it's very nearly science-fiction, but Roth is a good writer and good writers are nothing if not believable. Roth the character is caught up in all the mental chicanery of any normal young boy, and Roth the writer captures it all with an alarming poignancy that is worth the price of admission.

I highly, highly recommend this book to any interested readers, and I encourage you to read it as a "genre" book. (See previous posts on Chabon for a discussion of the "genre" category and all it entails.)

a little pulp to lighten your load

In a strange twist of literary fate, I have finished three books in the last two days. One is the relatively serious Religious Literacy, a short little non-fiction tome bemoaning the loss of religious literacy in the U.S. The other two, alas, are a little less academic and lot more entertaining: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.

I have been on a bit of a Hammett kick recently, so let's start with The Thin Man. Hammett established his reputation by writing short, intense detective thrillers. They tended to star The Continental Op, the otherwise nameless detective characterized by his employer, The Continental Detective Agency, and his stature, short and stout. After a time, Hammett tried his hand at longer, more complex narratives. One of those attempts was The Maltese Falcon. More than a novellette but not quite a full-fledged novel, this story featured the inimitable Sam Spade and has managed to stay in the public imagination in no small part because of the film starring Humphrey Bogart. The book works because there are only a handful of characters who lie, cheat, and steal. Plus, Spade runs about keeping them all in check and is himself quite a handful. The Thin Man, however, takes a giant leap further into the realm of complexity. It's almost not worth the ride, but Hammett redeems himself with the delightful duo of Nick and Nora Charles. Nick is a retired detective. He married the independently wealthy Nora, he helps her stay rich, and he spends the majority of his time drinking, carousing, and dodging bullets. He's an homage to old school macho, hard-boiled to the extreme. After getting seriously grazed by a gangster's bullet, Nick asks for a drink before calling a doctor. And while most of Hammett's females are either femme fatales or hilarious send-ups of the weaker sex, Nora is a quick-witted sidekick. She disappears a little too much for a feminist like myself to be happy, but she never frets and gives Nick some well-deserved crap every chapter or two.

Plotwise, this book is a bit of a disaster. Too many characters are doing too many things to too many other characters without probable cause. And it's awfully difficult to see the end from any point besides the end. I like a good mystery. I like to be tricked, too. But the mystery in The Thin Man is not the one described in the book, but rather the fact that it is considered readable by any but the most devoted of mystery fans. Good mysteries usually provide a few clues for the discriminating reader. They leave you scratching your head at the end and thinking, "Man, how did I miss that? It was so obvious." or "Wow, I never saw that one coming." Unfortunately, at the end of this book, I found myself thinking "That was stupid. And incomprehensible." Yes, I actually think things like that. The problem is that everyone ran around being crazy and misleading, and Nick pops in at the end and says, "Here's what I think. Now let's grab a drink." And that's pretty much the entire last chapter. Well, not quite. He gives a nice little speech about how the real world has a lot more ambiguity and indecision than people think. He goes on to say that sometimes that's all you get - there're no guarantees and there's no surety. A thoroughly modern sentiment from a writer who brought about modernity. And on that at least I can look back and say, "A pretty good read." (But if you're new to Hammett, read The Maltese Falcon first.)