The Plot against America: A Novel

I have very little to add to the praise that has already been heaped on The Plot against America. That most esteemed critic, Harold Bloom, has already called it "a wise and fascinating book." Why do you need my opinion? Still, with a new Roth novel hitting the shelves every year, it's impossible to keep up. Readers must be asking themselves, why read this one?

The answer is that Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book is different from anything he's published before. Narrated by Philip Roth at ten years old, the novel recounts, in affectionate detail, Roth's childhood in the Newark neighborhood he grew up in. What makes this a novel and not a memoir is a single change Roth makes to history. In the 1940 presidential election, the American people elect Charles Lindbergh instead of Franklin Roosevelt.

This is significant for two reasons. First, as a Nazi sympathizer and a staunch isolationist, Lindbergh’s election to the highest office in the land signals America's refusal to enter the "European War." Second, Lindbergh is an anti-Semite.

When they hear the news, Philip's parents are horrified. They are not only horrified that America will not lend a hand in beating back the spread of worldwide fascism, they are worried that Lindbergh will prove as dangerous to America's Jews as Hitler is to Europe's.

Though Lindbergh makes no changes that immediately affect their lives, the Roths don't trust the administration's intentions. Among the neighborhood's many first and second generation Jews, memories of Old World pogroms remain fresh, and rumors of the Fourth Reich’s concentration camps have reached Newark’s suburbs.

Philip's frightened parents try to assuage their fears by reminding themselves that they live in America, where the Constitution guarantees certain inalienable rights, where hardworking, upright Jews have always been welcomed as valuable citizens. Yet as events unfold, they gradually realize that the country is teetering on the brink. One good shove and American democracy just may slide down the perilous slope to...what? Fascism? No one is quite sure what lies ahead. Roth's sense of foreboding and projected menace are the engine that drives the novel forward. As the young Philip reflects:

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

• Read more about this book