...a historical novel, of a fantastic sort. In the book’s first paragraph, heading off all the true-to-life details, comes the statement that these events took place during the Lindbergh Administration … One of the glories of the book is its counterpoint of large and small, its zooming back and forth, from chapter to chapter, between world events and the reactions to them in the Roth household. On the night of the Republicans’ balloting, Weequahic is loud with radios, as tense Jews sit waiting to find out if a Nazi sympathizer is going to run for President of their country … One thing to notice is that the story is a fable... It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as it goes along.
Hitler's allies rule the White House. Anti-Semitic mobs roam the streets. The lower-middle-class Jews of Weequahic, in Newark, N.J., cower in a second-floor apartment, trying to figure out how to use a gun to defend themselves. The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible … One of Roth's talents is the ability to spin the decibel dial as he writes dialogue, such that, in The Plot Against America, his little boys emit thin little sounds (which are rendered still more plaintive by shifting into present tense), and the father in his humbleness emits a slightly louder tone, and cousin Alvin a shriekier one. In this fashion, the tones ascend in volume until, at last, Franklin Roosevelt addresses an anti-Lindbergh rally at Madison Square Garden. Roosevelt sonorously declaims, in syllables so majestic that only dashes will suffice, ‘We – choose – freedom!’
The book’s premise — what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism — is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel’s credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years … The nightmare of the Lindbergh presidency becomes, for Roth the novelist, a way of applying a brutal pressure to his father and mother, an experiment that reveals, in extremis, their true worth. At the moment of greatest crisis, each of them is called upon to act, and each shows the clarity of genuine courage, mobilized by their most deeply held ideals.
What the plot against America does to young Philip between the ages of seven and nine is terrible. It forces upon him—though less, it must be noted, at first hand than through the medium of newsreels and radio programs and from eavesdropping on his parents’ worried conversations—a vision of a world based on hatred and suspicion, a world of them and us. It turns him from a Jewish American into an American Jew, or in the eyes of his enemies just a Jew in America … The Plot Against America is not a major work. What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humor, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip. The subject of the keenest pathos is not young Philip—though, clutching his stamp album, heading off into the night, determined to be just a boy again, Philip is pathetic enough—but Philip’s neighbor and shadow self, Seldon Wishnow.
While the portions of the book depicting the fictional Roth family of Newark do an understated – and at times, deeply affecting – job of showing how violently public events can intrude upon the private realm of family and dent the shiny daydreams of a young boy, Mr. Roth never, even momentarily, persuades the reader to set aside the knowledge that Roosevelt won a third term in 1940 and that Nazism did not triumph in the United States … The Plot Against America hurries toward a preposterous (albeit clever) ending and takes place in a political landscape that remains cartoony in the extreme – a sort of high-concept, comic-book landscape that might work in a big-screen extravaganza or satiric potboiler but that feels oddly flimsy here, especially when foregrounded with characters as realistic and psychologically vivid as members of the Roth family.
A number of novels in recent years have fictionalized or fabulized the Holocaust. Roth is up to something different; he is wondering what his own life might have been like if history, which is so fragile, had moved in a different direction. The novel is framed as a memoir of his boyhood in Newark … The book is a tribute to Roth’s parents—it imagines that under conditions of extreme duress, they would have acted with courage and dignity … Everything else in the novel eventually returns to normal—so that the Lindbergh years in this universe become just a terrible detour. The only thing that’s different in the alternate future is Roth. He is frightened and overly cautious and needlessly loquacious. The narrator of this book is not the tirading monologuist of Portnoy’s Complaint or Operation Shylock or even The Human Stain. Had it happened here, we might have got this sentimental, essayistic champion of Jewish Newarkers.
America, for the seven-year-old Philip Roth of the start of the book, was a synonym for safety...What robs the boy of this endowment is not a terrorist attack but an election, and behind the election – behind the whole book in many ways – are a few sentences from a speech which the historical Charles Lindbergh gave to an America First Committee rally in 1941 … What’s astonishing is still the quiet domesticity of the story and its telling. The small scale of these lives almost allows us to miss – and this is the point – the large scale of the threat. History is not only what happens to everybody, and not only the narrative of our fear; it is also seen from another angle, the way we tame our surprises. America is bowled over by Lindbergh’s landslide victory, but ‘by the day after . . . everybody seemed to understand everything.’
Insecurity saturates The Plot Against America. Unfortunately, the saturation goes right down to the level of its telling. For a writer blessed with the eyes and ears to find real life fantastic in every detail, fantasy is the wrong form … Roth's preparation of an alternative history is just a rearrangement of the furniture. If it had really concerned him, he might have done it more adroitly. But what really concerns him is the notion of an America with its traditional anti-Semitic prejudices given official endorsement. ‘Our homeland was America,’ says the Roth-like narrator. ‘Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.’ Roth's challenge is to show how it changed. The challenge is not easily met, because America was never Germany … It's an understandable bad dream. But it hasn't led to a good book, and couldn't have.
This is not a novel about Lindbergh (or Roosevelt, or Henry Ford, or Fiorello LaGuardia, or any of the other historical figures who appear in its pages) but a novel about America: the complex and often contentious mix of people who inhabit it, its sustaining strengths and its persistent vulnerabilities, its susceptibility to demagoguery and anti-democratic impulses. It is also a novel about living amid the turmoil and unpredictability of history, about people's powerlessness ‘to stop the unforeseen,’ … For once in his fiction, the self is less important than the world outside. The Plot Against America is far and away the most outward-looking, expansive, least narcissistic book Roth has written. The effects upon young Roth of the imagined events of 1940-42 obviously are of interest and importance to him, but the real core of the book is family, community and country, and the consequences for all these of America's flirtation with fascism.
In a breath-taking leap of imagination, Roth describes what could have happened between 1940 and 1942, after Lindbergh runs and defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt and signs ‘understandings’ with Germany and Japan. Supporters wear buttons that read: KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THE JEWISH WAR … There's much ardor in The Plot Against America. The writing is brilliant when the focus is on the Roths and their neighborhood and what it meant to be a working-class Jew when there were more Jewish gangsters than rich Jews. But Roth lapses into melodrama when he tries to tie up all the loose ends in such a hurry that he fails to explain how another presidential election was held in 1942 … Lindbergh is more a hovering presence than a character.
Unlike Roth's own boyhood worries about the Germans and Japanese, the novel's Philip worries about being a Jew in America headed by Lindbergh. ‘Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,’ the novel's opening sentence, is borne out in Philip's actively tormented imaginings: He dreams, for example, that his precious stamp collection (which he eventually loses while trying to run away from home) has been adorned with swastikas … What may be called the ‘Philip voice’ is in charge of the family story that contains such beautifully particularized events as the Roths visiting Washington for an ‘education’ trip and meeting, for the first time in Philip's consciousness, anti-Semitism.
Clearly Roth's real target isn't an anti-Semitic aviation hero who died 30 years ago. It's an electorate he sees as dazzled by attractive faces, moved by simple slogans, and cowed by ominous warnings about threats to our security. The result is a cautionary story in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, a stunning work of political extrapolation about a triumvirate of hate, ignorance, and paranoia that shreds decency and overruns liberty … In a voice that blends the tones of the author's nostalgia with the boy's innocence, Phil describes the national crisis through its effect on his own family. It's a narrative structure fraught with risks, particularly the danger of making this 7-year-old boy look cloying or inappropriately sophisticated, but Roth keeps his bifocal vision in perfect focus.
[Roth’s] latest novel, intriguingly titled The Plot Against America, couldn't be more amazing. An excursion into alternative history, it is in conception as daring as any of the best of such creations … The Plot Against America stands almost in a category by itself, a book driven by twin engines of historical curiosity: the anti-Semitic strain in American culture as exemplified by the isolationist views of Charles Lindbergh, and Jewish paranoia … Roth's novel turns disaster into an engaging story. Parallel to the rise of Lindbergh's proto-fascist American presidency, with state visits by Nazi luminaries and a plan to relocate and ‘Americanize’ East Coast Jewish families, is young Philip's education into the realities of his own family life. His father wrestles with the problems created by the new government, his mother endures, his brother Sandy flirts with the Lindbergh policies, and his aunt's husband, a Newark rabbi named Bengelsdorf, becomes a figurehead for the new relocation program.
Lindbergh becomes president, largely by promising to keep America out of the war, and Roth's childhood stumbles through a growing anti-Semitism in America. Sound impossible? The Roth family has trouble taking it seriously, too, and before long they're split apart: The Roth pater is sputteringly mad but stands firm, older brother Sandy rebelliously endorses Lindbergh's ideas, and live-in cousin Alvin troops off to Canada the better to fight Nazis overseas, returning wounded and utterly broken. The American Jewish family has been divided and conquered; unlike the Nazi techniques, Lindbergh's regime has put an American, can-do face on its anti-Semitic policies … The Plot Against America is an epic, unforeseen and unexpected even given its author. As crucial as history, it is also as ferocious.
Roth’s latest (and one of his most audacious) is narrated by a fictional character named Philip Roth, who describes the impact of Lindbergh’s presidency (linked ominously to ‘Lindy’s’ cordial relationship with fellow statesman Adolf Hitler) on Newark insurance salesman Herman Roth, his stoical wife Bess, and their sons Philip and Sanford … The tight focus on the Roths itself shifts when Lindbergh-hating columnist Walter Winchell announces his presidential candidacy, violence escalates alarmingly, martial law is imposed, war with Canada (whence many Jewish families flee) is anticipated, and a savagely ironic turn of events returns FDR to the national spotlight—but doesn’t assuage Herman Roth’s all-too-justifiable fears … Hilarious and terrifying by turns, it’s a sumptuous interweaving of narrative, characterization, speculation, and argument.
