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.)