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A kitchen table in Newark
A Review by Michael Gorra

Roll the dice, spin the wheel, and step into the neverland of some counterfactual counterlife. Take your chance and predict the past, betting on what might have happened if only what did happen hadn't. Suppose that back in 1959 no one had felt threatened by Goodbye Columbus. Oh, it still wins the National Book Award, the words on the page remain the same, and yet nobody, but nobody at all, is enraged by Philip Roth's initial attempt to define the world of semi-observant and sexually eager smartass New Jersey Jews. What happens next? Without the letters accusing him of anti-Semitism, and the crowds waiting with the verbal equivalent of baseball bats, would he have gone on to the calculated outrage, the perfect fusion of chutzpah and sprezzatura, of Portnoy's Complaint (1969)? And without Portnoy, and its sales, and its notoriety, would there have been a Nathan Zuckerman? And without Zuckerman, would this American life have had its long second act, the quarter-century of achievement that began with The Ghost Writer (1979)? No hostility -- and no readerly insistence on taking the book for the life -- and maybe "Philip Roth" would just be someone who once won a prize, before settling down to run a graduate programme in creative writing.

I am not arguing the benefits of a critical mugging, though Roth himself maintains that "this conflict with my Jewish critics was as valuable a struggle as I could have had at the outset of my career". My point is that history could have gone another way, and imagining such other ways has become one of Roth's most dizzying strengths. Take a character, and change nothing about him except his fate. The dentist Henry Zuckerman in the paradigmatic Counterlife (1986) -- dead on a heart surgeon's table? Or recovered from his bypass, and living in Israel, a West Bank fanatic? Maybe the dead guy is Henry's older brother, the novelist Nathan, or maybe Nathan has only imagined his own death, and then imagined the hysteria of the dentist's refusal to mourn. But why stop there? By now Roth has sprouted so many counterlives that he divides his list of books into sections. There are the Zuckerman books, and then the ones about that professor of desire, David Kepesh, which include a post-Freudian version of "The Metamorphosis" called The Breast (1972). There are the "Other Books", which number among them both Portnoy and the blasted unrelenting pages of Sabbath's Theater (1995). And finally we have the "Roth Books", in which novels like the Nabokovian Operation Shylock (1993) are mingled indiscriminately with, well, The Facts (1988).

The Plot Against America is a "Roth book", in which a narrator of that name offers a memoir of the "perpetual fear" of his Newark childhood, a childhood marked by the incipient fascism of the Lindbergh Presidency. Most of us don't remember that administration, but in 1941 the famous pilot really did give a speech in which he announced that he would talk "with the utmost frankness" about the groups that wanted an American entry into the Second World War: "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration". Lindbergh drew a sharp distinction between American Jews and their fellow citizens, as in "their large ownership" of "our press", and The Plot Against America uses his address to entertain a simple counterfactual premiss. Suppose he had given it a year before, in the early summer of 1940? Soon afterwards, the Republicans meet to nominate their Presidential candidate, but after twenty ballots the process remains deadlocked. Then the "lean, tall, handsome hero, a lithe, athletic-looking man not yet forty years old", arrives on the convention floor, still clothed "in his flying attire". He is greeted with a "surge of redemptive excitement", receives the nomination by acclamation, and campaigns by flying solo around the country in the Spirit of St Louis itself, his entire platform a promise "to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war". And the fact that he is on good terms with Nazi Germany, having received a medal from Goering himself, makes it look as though he can keep his word. The election isn't even close.

"Is it good for the Jews?" That is the question on which the world of seven-year-old Philip seems to hang. Roth has been asking a version of that question, with varying degrees of irony, ever since his early story, "The Conversion of the Jews", and indeed that is what his own first critics asked about him: what did his extraordinarily sophisticated and yet all-too-accessible fiction mean for the public place, the American place, of a group that history itself had put on guard? As for Lindbergh, of course he isn't good for the Jews. "'No!' was the word that awakened us", on the night of the nomination, "'No!' being shouted in a man's loud voice from every house on the block", and when Philip joins the rest of the family round the radio, his mother has "her fingers over her mouth as though she were trying to keep from being sick". Soon after his election "straight-talking Lindy" reaches what is called the "Iceland Understanding" with Hitler. But the Roths' first personal difficulties - and these characters have the names of the writer's actual family, his parents Herman and Bess and his older brother Sandy -come on a long-planned trip to Washington. At the Lincoln Memorial, Herman's praise of Roosevelt leads another tourist to call him a "loudmouth Jew", and a few hours later, their suddenly restricted hotel puts the family out on the street, though making no charge "for the bar of soap that is missing".

Back in Newark, Sandy Roth gets invited to spend the summer of 1941 on a tobacco farm, courtesy of a programme sponsored by the new Office of American Absorption, in which "city youth" are schooled "in the traditional ways of summer life". He comes home besotted with Lindy, his stomach full of bacon. Nevertheless daily life does, for a while, seem to go on, a life defined in long, enumerative sentences, a romance of the quotidian:

The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time . . . washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars . . . attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

There is no equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws, and the press knows only self-censorship. It takes time for Lindbergh's election fully to challenge "that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child", but eventually that challenge does arrive. The FBI come asking questions about Philip's Cousin Alvin, who has joined the Canadian Army; the Office of American Absorption develops further plans. Then one of the book's historical figures, the popular gossip columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell, born Winschel, gets pulled off the air after denouncing "Lindbergh's treasonous lies". Soon afterwards, Winchell announces his own campaign for the Presidency, and the riots and the burnings and the shootings begin.

Roth has disclaimed any intention of writing a roman-a-clef. Nevertheless it is impossible to read this book, in which an election plunges the nation into an alternative universe, without America's current condition in mind. The sense of "perpetual fear", whatever the source, the euphemisms and the coded speech, even the nation's conception -- blue state Newark aside -- of Lindbergh as the embodiment of "normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man . . . (with) the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history": all this recalls the present situation. But then every historical novel invokes the time of its writing, even those that describe a past that never was. 'Tis sixty years since, as Scott said of the action of Waverley, and though Roth seems less sanguine than his predecessor, he does observe the protocols Scott established. He sets his tale two generations back, as in War and Peace or Waverley itself, and he keeps the world- historical figures at a safe remove, concentrating instead on those of middling condition, on whose lives the actions of the great impinge. Here, in fact, Roth has a distinct advantage. He doesn't have to engineer a meeting with the Young Pretender or come up with a battlefield across which Napoleon can be dimly seen. His characters have only to turn on the radio to feel historical process grinding away.

And just as Edward Waverley finds himself torn by the events into which he stumbles, by the conflict between his English inheritance and the temptations of a charismatic leader, so Sandy Roth is split as well. A poster boy for the Office of American Absorption, he is invited to meet not only Lindbergh, but also a visiting Nazi at a White House dinner. His parents forbid it, but he plans to go anyway, and "I don't care whether you ghetto Jews like it or not". That term probably isn't one the young Roth, the real Roth, would have used on his critics, even if he did need to learn how to defend himself against other Jews. Yet while the shock of that lesson may have prompted some of his best work, The Ghost Writer in particular, Roth seems here to have crossed sides. Sandy's words are horrifying. For an instant he becomes the self-hating Jew that his creator has often been called, and when Bess Roth smacks the boy "across the face", resorting for once to "traditional methods of coercion", our sympathies remain entirely with her.

I suspect that with time such moments, in which Roth appears to stand shoulder to shoulder with the world of his fathers, will prove as central to our understanding of him as Portnoy's Complaint itself. He hasn't recanted and he hasn't lost a bit of his ability to shock, but for many years now there has been a touch of the pious Aeneas about him, in the fidelity with which he has counted the fears and desires of his parents' generation, in the way he has done his duty by the streets and quarrels of his birth. Mickey Sabbath, after making one last trip through Newark, thinks hard about suicide and then rejects it. "How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here."

It might not be quite like that for Roth himself, and yet every ladder out does start there, in the rags and bones of New Jersey as much as in Judaism itself. Not that the two can be separated. "The kitchen table in Newark happens to be the source of your Jewish memories", Nathan Zuckerman says to his brother Henry in The Counterlife; Newark, and not Minsk or Jerusalem, not Talmud or Torah. And Roth himself has always returned to that table, in the savage loyalty of Sabbath's Theater as much as in the unexpected tenderness of Patrimony (1991); returned above all in such recent Zuckerman books as American Pastoral (1997) or I Married a Communist (1998), in which the ageing narrator follows the figures of his old neighbourhood out into the world.

The Plot Against America continues the work of those books, "a patriotic literary project", as the critic Greil Marcus puts it, that explores "what it means both to invent a country and . . . to invent oneself". Page by page it is never less than alive. Yet it does not -- once past its initial, one-sentence high concept -- have quite the jaw-dropping effect of Roth's other late novels, and this may, paradoxically, be an effect of the subject itself. For though Roth often works by making us shake our heads in disbelief, this book demands the very opposite. It must be all too believable, both the country's political turn and our sense of the narrator's pre Lindbergh world as representing an American norm. In the book's early pages, that seems to impose a sense of restraint and even sobriety, as though Roth were determined to underplay his own manic gifts. Still, the grip of the logic by which he shows how it could happen here, the arc of the national descent into what he calls the "American berserk" -- all that is powerfully traced. Effective too is the bitter comedy of Cousin Alvin's return from the Canadian Army, minus a leg, and Roth's account of the skill young Philip develops in bandaging his stump, a "featureless animal, something on which... (one) could have crayoned eyes, a nose, a mouth, teeth, and ears, and turned it into the likeness of a rat"; and there is always that limpid, that ever precise, almost invisible prose.

Nevertheless, many of the book's sharpest moments lack a fully necessary relation to its opening premiss. Philip's fear of his grandparents' ghosts in the basement, the tough-guy relatives in produce, and the cameos of Newark's racketeers, or the boy's account of "the great new aim I'd unearthed for my eight-year-old life: to escape it", which leads him into a brief career of "following Christians" on Newark's city buses: these genre scenes could be in any of his novels. But the counterfactual history looming over them makes them less urgent. At the same time, their very familiarity underlines something that even Roth cannot quite make us forget. Leave aside the exit from nightmare suggested by the fact that this narrator is alive to recall his boyhood. We still know that Lindbergh was never President, and entertaining the possibility that he was involves us in a different and less complete order of belief than do the usual hypotheticals of fiction.

I almost wrote "realistic fiction" -- but that begs the question. Roth's wildness has always been of a different order from that of such co-evals as John Barth or Robert Coover. He was a realist in the 1960s, when a self-reflexive schtick was all the rage, but the range of formal pressures he has brought to bear on the novel in the decades since far exceeds anything his contemporaries have attempted. If nobody calls him an "experimental" writer it is simply because most of his experiments work. They work because there is something visceral and necessary about them, something prompted by the way his early critics rubbed his face in what he calls "the relationship between the written and the unwritten world".

And they work too because this most importunate of American writers has made those experiments coexist with a minute attention to the way we live and talk now, to the way we lived then. The Plot Against America offers a plaus-ible description of a world that never was. It may not be one of Roth's four or five best books. But nobody else would even have tried it, and such distinctions matter little in a career of such fecundity and length, a career in which his different counterlives have started to run together, a Yoknapatawpha, a controlled explosion of the mind.

One of Roth's greatest strengths is the ability to craft a provocative ending, and the beautifully paced concluding pages of The Plot Against America can stand with his finest work. In 1942, as the country falls into riot, Herman and Sandy Roth make a four-day trip to rescue a former neighbour, a drive to Kentucky and back of 1,500 pre-Interstate miles, with Sandy reading the road map by flashlight and his father, "who'd never fired a shot in his life", sitting at the wheel with a loaded pistol in his lap. The trip "was the adventure of Sandy's lifetime", and for Herman "His Guadalcanal, I suppose, his Battle of the Bulge". Those words tell us we have returned to a world in which the Battle of the Bulge did happen, that without cancelling anything, we have come back to a history we recognize. I won't say how the country emerges from the Lindbergh years, except to note that it requires a carefully planned deus ex machina. That narrative machinery is the very opposite of reassuring; and it roots a national emergency in the family drama of the President himself.

In one of his books, Philip Roth -- or is it Zuckerman? -- claims that New Jersey's biggest successes are the people after whom the highway rest-stops are named. Maybe someday he will get one. For now he will have to be content with the unofficial canon of the Library of America, which next year will make him the third living writer, after Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, to find a home on its list.

Michael Gorra's The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany was published earlier this year. He chairs the English Department at Smith College.