Audaciously original and richly ironic, Roth’s new fiction, already categorized as another of the “Roth books” because its narrator bears the author’s name and facts resonate autobiographically, bores in on what it means to be a Jew in America. The years are 1940 – 42. The reverberation is 2004. Charles A. Lindbergh has been elected America’s 33rd president, defeating FDR in a landslide. Armed with substantial research and strategically deploying set-piece hamish humor, Roth explores through the eyes of young Philip Roth — seven when the Republicans nominate the famous Nazisympathizing aviator — the complex theme of American anti-Semitism. He posits an ingenious “what if,” and then cunningly closes the gap between farfetched hypothetical and possible reality. The concept of a fantastical premise that provokes serious rumination is hardly new to Roth: in The Breast, David Kepesh awakens one morning to find himself turned into a giant mammary gland and must confront questions of identity. In The Plot Against America Roth’s incredible imagination functions to deeper, wider and more Jewish-inflected purpose: Who are America’s Jews? How and why do they see themselves (or not) assimilating into the heartland? How do gentiles see Jews? To what extent is any American who happens to be any degree Jewish shadowed always by a Jewish counter life? One may be reminded of Sartre’s sardonic observation that the world decided that it’s not up to Jews to say who is Jewish.
Roth embeds his satire in an engaging narrative about childhood and Newark’s Jews, many of whom, insular and paranoid, articulate clichés that turn out to be horrific truths (the novel’s opening word is “fear”), prompting readers to brood on the wisdom or futility of flight, collaboration, resistance, inertia, and on the lessons of history. The tale is told by an adult who looks back to when he was “innocent” for the last time — the word dilates in its etymological sense as freedom from harm — to when he enjoyed an “unfazed sense of security” because of the “big protective republic” in which he lived and because of his “ferociously responsible parents.” This may be Roth’s most affectionate portrayal of family yet.
But the domestic scenes darken with the isolationist clamor that it’s only the Jews who want war, their plot against America. Walter Winchell, aggressively playing to vulgar stereotype, counters that the plotters are Hitlerites and Jew-hating Christian fronts who would destroy the Constitution, while some Jews say other Jews just don’t get it. At the center of the deepening crisis is young Roth, who comes to understand how fear drives his mother, father, beloved older brother, cousin, and extended family members and friends, characters and caricatures, to give way to disappointing, absurd and violent behavior. Comic, tragic, ragged in its reach and resolution, but with numerous memorable scenes, all rendered with Roth’s superb, unerring ear, The Plot Against the Jews defies neat summary. Because of the density of the pseudo facts at the heart of this extraordinary riff on history, Roth includes a 27-page postscript, which contains “A Note to the Reader, A True Chronology of the Major Figures, Other Historical Figures in the Work, Some Documentation.” Readers may want to start with this section.
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