Nazis in the White House, Job in New Jersey
by Randy Boyagoda
ake up one morning as a 155-pound breast, or watch your President rub shoulders with Adolf Hitler: In Philip Roth’s caustic imagination, these are equally plausible. His new novel, The Plot Against America, offers perhaps his most phantasmagoric proposal since the transformation of poor David Kapesh into a whopping mammary gland. Roth re-conceives American life during the early stages of World War II through the experiences of an average Jewish family in Newark whose members lead average American lives, until Charles Lindbergh — aviation celebrity, anti-Semite, and vocal isolationist — defeats FDR in his second reelection bid. He rapidly moves a smitten country off the path to war in Europe alongside the Allies, and onto an assiduously non-interventionist track in sympathy with Germany and Japan. Simultaneously, his administration enacts a series of domestic programs that betray an ominously friendly interest in America’s Jewish population. Kafka’s spirit governs over The Plot, just as it presided over The Breast, only we’ve moved from the absurd tragedy of The Metamorphosis to the numb dystopia of The Trial.
The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, August 2004
400 pages.
ISBN 0-618-50928-3.
$26.00 (cloth)
We learn of Lindbergh’s ascent from narrator Philip Roth, a young Jewish kid growing up amidst the ethnic jumble of 1930’s East Coast America, whose parents’ and older brother’s identities match those of the author’s own. This is not the first time Roth has involved “Roth” in his fiction; we are invited again to enter into a post-modern game of determining authenticity, autobiography, and authorial presence, as in The Facts and Operation Shylock. But the frisson of discovering deeper parallels between Philip-the-author and Philip-the-narrator fades fast; this dimension of the novel will be of lasting interest only to future dissertation writers.
The Plot sounds strongest against Roth’s recent “American trilogy.” In its third volume, The Human Stain, Roth skewered the fruity sensitivities of academic culture while tracing out the persistent complexities of “passing,” against the splotchy backdrop of the Lewinsky scandal. As in its predecessors (American Pastoral and I Married a Communist), historical forces enter the novel through the private lives of ordinary men and women whose distance from very American spectacles closes off dramatically, unexpectedly, and suddenly. Roth’s protagonists and their families, like their neighborhoods and their nation after HUAAC, after Vietnam, and now, after Lindbergh, are left to make sense of much emotional, physical, and political wreckage, if only in advance of history’s next convulsion.
Ultimately, Roth’s dispassionate treatment of America’s strident and clumsy march through the twentieth century is defined by his unforgiving fixation on the muddiest corners of American Jewish experience, from Goodbye, Columbus through Portnoy’s Complaint, and now, reaching a Sinai summit of hysteria, with The Plot. With unprecedented tenderness this time around, Roth treats of a young boy entering into fuller knowledge of himself, his family, and the history that roars around him, sweeping up questions of what it means to be Jewish, and what it means to be American. While this softer key provides some lovely moments, The Plot ultimately lacks the fullness of intellectual, political, and cultural inquisition that we’ve come to expect from Philip Roth, and that we’d want in a novel of such paranoiac nation-dreaming.
Initially, the Roth family leads an innocently American life, equally proud of its ethnic heritage and national character, while naturally, if distantly worried about developments overseas. Then, in 1940, Lindbergh wins the Presidency, capitalizing on his celebrity status and “twentieth century Americans weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade.” The Roths are suddenly faced with a very immediate crisis of their own, as their new President and Hitler sign “an understanding guaranteeing peaceful relations between the United States and Germany.” One of the finest stretches of the novel follows immediately out of this grim parallel universe. Philip’s father packs the family off to DC to remind them of America’s greatness, and, implicitly, to diagnose the nation’s altered state. While the episode leads to some ugly moments of now confidently open Jew baiting and provokes resilient responses from Philip’s parents, the section’s fineness comes out of its excruciating build-up. We’re waiting for something truly awful to happen, in direct sympathy with the main characters as they patriotically, if gingerly, amble from monument to monument. And just when we relax, going with the family “off to have a drink in the cafeteria” after a mild day of sightseeing, Philip reports,
a low-flying plane in the distance came zooming our way. As the roar grew louder, people shouted ‘It’s the president! It’s Lindy!’ …. It was the same Lockheed fighter we’d seen in the air over the city the previous afternoon, and we had no choice but to stand there like patriots and watch with the rest of them.
