t matters who reads this book. For someone who is not an American (like myself), to read The Plot Against America is to feel almost like a peeping Tom. For Americans at the end of 2004, who are (I think) in very much more than the obvious and banal sense the readers specifically addressed in this strange and vertiginously truncated alternate history set in 1940-1942, Philip Roth's 25th novel is more likely to feel like listening to father. Roth is not a particularly old man (71) but he is an old novelist (Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award, was first published in 1959), and he addresses his fellow citizens in the public/private familial voice of a writer who has been doing so for 45 years. The Plot Against America is an admonition to the children.
For readers of SF, the alternate-history engine that motors the book can be dealt with pretty quickly. Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election, unseating Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide victory generated in part by the American isolationism Roth amply documents in a lengthy postscript, and in part through the anti-Semitism that Lindbergh, almost demurely, ignites (this too is given ample documentation). But the ascendancy of Lindbergh, and the beginnings of a persecution of American Jews, are not meant to be understood as a fixated nightmare of history. In this, The Plot Against America is unlike almost any fellow text in the long formidable roster of Hitler Wins tales, from Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937) through Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and on; readers of SF alternate histories will have to reconcile themselves to the fact that Roth is not much interested in the alternate-history implications of a Nazi-hued regime in 1940s America, because he terminates the Lindbergh presidency after only two years, at a point when (in an orthodox SF novel) events are just beginning to hot up. And not only does he kill Lindbergh off, he makes very sure that his readers know, from very early on, that something like the air crash that does the Sky Pilot in is going to happen: The book is narrated, sometime around 2004, by its protagonist (whose name is Philip Roth, who was born in 1933, like Roth, and whose early life is much like Roth's own early life), and we know that this fictional Philip Roth could not have survived in America until now if Lindbergh had lived; and there are several references to post-1942 historical events that would not have occurred had the world not somehow reverted to norm. At book's end, we discover that the year's delay in America's entering World War II has not affected its outcome one whit. The Plot Against America is an alternate history in which nothing sticks. (A derisory fatalism, which I very much doubt Roth intends to convey, can be read from such a failure of outcome: for if nothing that happens in the political sphere has consequences, then nothing that you can yourself do in the political sphere can be truly consequential. So why worry? The world is too dense upon its course to swerve, really.)
So why tell it?
It is here that I should perhaps recuse myself from undue speculation, on the grounds that I am not one of the children addressed. Because it seems pretty obvious, though it is in no strict sense allegorical, that the Plot Against America is "really" about the Bush administration. No more than Lindbergh does Bush make statements that explicitly confirm the worst anticipations of his political enemies; but Plot masterfully conveys a sense of the political and personal paranoias that afflict so many Americans now, and even more tellingly conveys a sense of the deep-winter chill so many Americans feel, the chill wintry breath of something dreadful welling up through the interstices of the old comity. When he has an American Jew in 1940 say of the Republicans who have hijacked the nation, "They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare," I think it is hard to avoid knowing who and what is being addressed.
As I said already, to witness so parental an admonition is to feel like a peeping Tom.
An unbearable heaviness of being
There is one other axis to sort before The Plot Against America can quite enter the heart. Accustomed readers of alternate histories have grown to expect a certain relationship to exist between the characters who experience the alteration in the world, and the tracing of the story of that alteration to its logical conclusion. Accustomed readers expect characters to serve mainly as illustrations of the workings of the engine of history, but in this novel, Roth has reversed that relationship. The central focus of The Plot Against America is intimate; the book is shaped to allow close focus on the story of the nearly intolerable stresses imposed by the world upon individual humans—in this case upon a tight-knit Jewish family in urban New Jersey, familiar Philip Roth country. Any alternate history must create exempla, in order to point its alternativeness; few can afford (nor are authored with sufficient skill to succeed at any attempt to) give glimpses of the blast-furnace heat of any single human life, the mutable alarums and heavy keel of any single real moment in the world lived by humans. In the frame of an alternate history, then, Philip Roth's father, the real hero of the book, is an extraordinary creation. At first glimpse he seems little more than a shouter caught in a changing world, soon to be cowed (so we can get back to Lindbergh and the gang), but by the end he has evolved into a figure as immovable as some hero of legend, an example of things far denser than any dictum he might illuminate. His wife, more quietly, is followed along the same course. They are carved into exempla, but remain molten, simultaneously. It is a great accomplishment.
Philip Roth himself (whose older self, as we've said, narrates from way up the line) is a deeply interesting child (readers more versed than this reviewer in Roth's large oeuvre may recognize this Roth as an imago of others). His older brother, temporarily suborned by a strength-through-joy program called Just Folks (which is designed to alienate urban Jewish children from their backgrounds), may also fit into a larger pattern of family portraits. Philip's maternal aunt, in the "ravenous mania" of her succumbing to the temptation to collaborate with the enemy, is a superb portrait of the allure of the carnal, of a terrible longing so easy to feel when the world presses too hard: the longing to gorge on poison. And the cousin, who loses a leg fighting for the British and who eventually becomes involved in organized crime, is also exemplary. But what he is exemplary of—an exemplariness pointed by the engine of change in the world—is the weight of being.
The Plot Against America is heavy with life; so heavy that it is at times hard to remember Mr. Lindbergh at all, hard to keep in mind the cartoon poison he serves as conduit for. For Roth, in this novel, the world itself is poison enough, as it turns on you; but the world is also manna in these pages, the grave manna of the lived.
