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.

This passage very nearly encapsulates the novel’s predicament: To the young narrator, it feels like a fighter jet is inexorably bearing down upon his family; and not only are they frozen in place with fear; not only is the plane flown by an anti-Semitic child-prince of a President; but to be “good Americans,” the Roths have to cheer along with their dazzled brethren.

The symbolic resonance of this moment sounds throughout the novel, and one hopes that present-day readers will exercise their imaginations beyond the small beer of substituting a Muslim family, F-18’s circling DC, and a boyish, geared-up President grinning to adoring crowds. It would be difficult to press for any substantial parallels between the novel’s wartime hysteria and our present, brittle moment, but in a subtly postmodern key, where all is fragment and irony, some images and character arrangements will encourage readers to see more than a long-ago, phantom limb America emerging from Roth’s pages.

Undoubtedly, much conversation about the novel will pounce on just such matters. Leaving aside this cat scratch criticism, one discovers that The Plot offers a steady and heated meditation on the private crises that come out of building pandemonium. Philip’s family divides over the central issue facing Jews in Lindbergh’s America: are they targets and, if so, when and how will the pogroms come? Because this is Roth, intense emotions crash around the kitchen table. An orphaned cousin, inspired by his uncle’s passionate denunciations of the Nazis but also rebelling against his authority, runs away to join the Canadian army, and loses his leg in the European theater. Alvin returns to Jersey only to descend into nihilism and number running; he embodies the bitter pointlessness of seemingly any private action intended to defeat, reject, or avoid the American Pharaoh, which the novel gives in to in its darkest moments. Meanwhile, Philip’s older brother and his aunt become proud supporters of Lindbergh and rise from lower middle-class anonymity to local celebrity status by immersing themselves in programs meant to “assimilate” Jews into wider America. Philip’s mother, perhaps Roth’s finest female character, worries over their chances to escape to Canada like their neighbors have done, and tries to maintain a normal home-life for her family. Philip’s father, a passionate and nearly indefatigable critic of Lindbergh and his duped Jews, eventually becomes a caricature of doomsday predictions and angry castigation, spiraling into failure and defeat before making good at novel’s end.

Even though we cannot grasp this history in advance, and despite Roth’s best efforts at maintaining uncertainty through the continual clash of contradictory voices, the novel’s set up makes for easy odds. We sense that the “Office of American Absorption,” which tries to move the family from Newark to Kentucky for “exciting new opportunities to expand their horizons and to strengthen their country,” is a cultural pogrom wrapped up in bureaucratic platitudes. Similarly, the “Just Folks” service that sends Philip’s brother Sandy off to a southern farm suggests a chipper reeducation labor camp for young Jewish men. Pushing through the month-by-month chapters, we start to drown out Herman Roth’s Job-like lamentations. We know he will be proven right about the State’s well-groomed anti-Semitism and fascist ambitions, and we grow impatient for Events, amid much prediction, warning, and bald-treaded argument between father and son, father and sister-in-law, father and nephew, father and Rabbi, father and radio, father and burgeoning fatherland.

The novel manages to overcome this lulling din because it approaches its historical and political landscapes through the experiences of a boy just breaching adult knowledge. Philip Roth, narrator, is more endearing than the mid-life crises who usually tell Roth’s stories, and the author maintains perfect pitch in tracing out Philip’s responses to his warring family; to the always-odd and now perhaps dangerous Christians around them; to an unlikable boyhood friend foisted upon him; and to the competing claims of youthful pursuit and historical awareness that define the novel’s most affecting passages. When, for example, a key character is assassinated, the news comes through a radio report that interrupts the decisive game of the 1942 World Series. Philip’s response is archetypal American boy: “I heard shouting in the street, then a scream from a nearby house, but the game had come back on and the suspense was tremendous.” When Philip eventually emerges, and a local tough announces “‘Go get your bats! The war is on!’” Roth layers cool irony onto the coincidence of national tragedy and boyhood glory.

When the expected pogroms do start, however, Roth fumbles. We are told that in Detroit’s “biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene crosses were ignited on the lawns.” Before we can contemplate this startling, Kristallnacht, U.S.A., Roth drops in a tutorial explaining the actual event in professorial detail, betraying meager faith in his readers’ historical awareness and in their imaginative abilities. He thereby denudes a key moment of its subtle horror. The historical appendix that follows the novel proves helpful, especially in regards to lesser known figures from this period that assume major roles, such as Burton K. Wheeler and Joachim Von Ribbentrop. Its very existence renders pointless Roth’s narrative excursions into History; these chunks clank and thud at inopportune moments throughout The Plot.

The novel’s most telling flaw, however, is that its main focus blurs when it could be sharpest. Roth has devoted 45 years, and thousands of pages, to tearing down simplistic ideas about Jewish identity, taking on all comers at all times with muscular style and a cutthroat intellect. In testing the Jewish claim to the American experiment in the most difficult context he can imagine, however, The Plot plops. Halfway through the novel, we come across a classic Philip Roth phenomenon: a two-page single paragraph meditation on the double meaning of Americans “being Jews.” Through punishing prose, Roth rejects God, rejects synagogue, rejects race, rejects ancient language, rejects schmaltzy ethnic pride — rejects most every imaginable source and standard for a people’s self-definition, save one. At the end of this streaking comet of a passage, this is where we land: “Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American.”

Is this Philip Roth, or Dr. Phil?

To be Jewish is to be yourself? To be American is to be yourself? No further commitments, obligations, virtues, histories, traditions needed? Just be yourself? At the core of this moving, horrifying book, the intellectual formulation of Jewish and American identity proves to be a puddle of drippy, 21st century identity-speak. In vain does one search this late fiction from a great American writer, from perhaps the great Jewish American writer, for finer knowledge of what American Jews drew on when they were expelled from their innocent Garden State, into a stars-and-stripes-and-swastikas desert.