The Plot Against America
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| The Plot Against America | |
 Dust jacket of first U.S. edition |
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| Author | Philip Roth |
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| Cover artist | Robert Overholtzer |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | novel, alternate history |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication date | September 2004 |
| Pages | 400 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0224074539 |
The Plot Against America: A Novel (ISBN 0-618-50928-3) is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee and his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
Roth has stated that the idea for the novel came to him while reading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s autobiography, in which Schlesinger makes a comment that some of the more radical Republican senators of the day wanted Lindbergh to run against Roosevelt. The title appears to be taken from that of a communist pamphlet published in support of the campaign against Burton K. Wheeler's re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1946. Despite Roth's claim that he was unaware of alternate history prior to writing The Plot Against America, some critics have argued that Roth may have been inspired by Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (mentioned in Roth's novel American Pastoral by narrator Nathan Zuckerman's father) or by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), depicting a defeated Europe in 1964 under Nazi rule, was the most cited precedent.[1][2]
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
Roth's plot, which features a rapid rise in antisemitism in the United States, has appeared far-fetched to some. However, Roth had written in his autobiography, The Facts, of the racial and antisemitic tensions that were a part of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. Several times in that book he describes children in his neighborhood being set upon simply because they were Jewish.
The novel has been criticized for its portrayal of increasing American antisemitism, in particular among Catholics, for the nature of its fictional portrayals of real-life characters like Lindbergh and for its rushed ending, featuring a drastic and odd resolution to the political situation reminiscent of a deus ex machina. Writer Bill Kauffman calls the book "a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping with hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has ever dared stand against the war machine."[3]
Outside the pages of American Conservative magazine, however, the book has fared better. The reviewer for The Washington Post, who explores the book's treatment of Lindbergh in some depth, calls the book "painfully moving" and a "genuinely American story."[4] The New York Times review described the book as "a terrific political novel" as well as "sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible."[5]
Many supporters and critics of the book alike took it as something of a roman à clef for or against the Bush administration and its policies[6], but though Roth is opposed to the Bush administration, he has strenuously and repeatedly denied such allegorical interpretations of his novel.
In 2005, the novel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
[edit] Historical figures
There are several historical figures who are presented in The Plot Against America:
- Father Coughlin
- Henry Ford
- Fritz Kuhn
- Adolf Hitler
- Fiorello H. LaGuardia
- Charles Lindbergh
- Joachim von Ribbentrop
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Dorothy Thompson
- Burton K. Wheeler
- Wendell Willkie
- Walter Winchell
[edit] Notes
- ^ Mars-Jones, Adam. "A fascist in the Oval Office? Fancy that". The Observer. 17 October 2004
- ^ Ross Douthat. "It Didn't Happen Here". Policy Review. February/March 2005.
- ^ Kauffman, Bill. "Heil to the Chief". The American Conservative. September 27, 2004.
- ^ Yardley, Jonathan. "Homeland Insecurity". The Washington Post. October 3, 2004. p. BW02
- ^ Berman, Paul. "The Plot Against America". The New York Times. October 3, 2004.
- ^ West, Diana. "The unnerving 'Plot'". Townhall.com. October 11, 2004.
[edit] External links
- "Lucky Lindy Unfortunate Jews", Christian Science Monitor
- New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani
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