"What if" scenarios are often suspect. They are sometimes thinly veiled tales of the gospel according to the author, taking on the claustrophobic air of a personal fantasia that can't be shared. Such is not the case with Philip Roth's tour de force, The Plot Against America. It is a credible, fully-realized picture of what could happen anywhere, at any time, if the right people and circumstances come together.

The Plot Against America explores a wholly imagined thesis and sees it through to the end: Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940. Lindbergh, the "Lone Eagle," captured the country's imagination by his solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 in the monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, then had the country's sympathy upon the kidnapping and murder of his young son. He was a true American hero: brave, modest, handsome, a patriot. According to some reliable sources, he was also a rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and a crypto-fascist. It is these latter attributes of Lindbergh that inform the novel.

The story is framed in Roth's own family history: the family flat in Weequahic, the neighbors, his parents, Bess and Herman, his brother, Sandy and seven-year-old Philip. Jewishness is always the scrim through which Roth examines American contemporary culture. His detractors say that he sees persecution everywhere, that he is vigilant in "Keeping faith with the certainty of Jewish travail"; his less severe critics might cavil about his portrayal of Jewish mothers and his sexual obsession, but generally give him good marks, and his fans read every word he writes and heap honors upon him. This novel will engage and satisfy every camp.

"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course, no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews." This is the opening paragraph of the book, which sets the stage and tone for all that follows. Fear is palpable throughout; fear of things both real and imagined. A central event of the novel is the relocation effort made through the Office of American Absorption, a government program whereby Jews would be placed, family by family, across the nation, thereby breaking up their neighborhoods--ghettos--and removing them from each other and from any kind of ethnic solidarity. The impact this edict has on Philip and all around him is horrific and life-changing. Throughout the novel, Roth interweaves historical names such as Walter Winchell, who tries to run against Lindbergh. The twist at the end is more than surprising--it is positively ingenious.

Roth has written a magnificent novel, arguably his best work in a long time. It is tempting to equate his scenario with current events, but resist, resist. Of course it is a cautionary tale, but, beyond that, it is a contribution to American letters by a man working at the top of his powers. --Valerie Ryan


From Publishers Weekly
During his long career, Roth has shown himself a master at creating fictional doppelgängers. In this stunning novel, he creates a mesmerizing alternate world as well, in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and Philip, his parents and his brother weather the storm in Newark, N.J. Incorporating Lindbergh's actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war, Roth builds an eerily logical narrative that shows how isolationists in and out of government, emboldened by Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism (he invites von Rippentrop to the White House, etc.), enact new laws and create an atmosphere of religious hatred that culminates in nationwide pogroms.Historical figures such as Walter Winchell, Fiorello La Guardia and Henry Ford inhabit this chillingly plausible fiction, which is as suspenseful as the best thrillers and illustrates how easily people can be persuaded by self-interest to abandon morality. The novel is, in addition, a moving family drama, in which Philip's fiercely ethical father, Herman, finds himself unable to protect his loved ones, and a family schism develops between those who understand the eventual outcome of Lindbergh's policies and those who are co-opted into abetting their own potential destruction. Many episodes are touching and hilarious: young Philip experiences the usual fears and misapprehensions of a pre-adolescent; locks himself into a neighbor's bathroom; gets into dangerous mischief with a friend; watches his cousin masturbating with no comprehension of the act. In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations, and if the lollapalooza of an ending is bizarre with its revisionist theory about the motives behind Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, it's the subtext about what can happen when government limits religious liberties in the name of the national interest that gives the novel moral authority. Roth's writing has never been so direct and accessible while retaining its stylistic precision and acute insights into human foibles and follies. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–When Charles Lindbergh, Republican candidate in the 1940 presidential race, defeats popular FDR in a landslide, pollsters scramble for explanations–among them that, to a country weary of crisis and fearful of becoming involved in another European war, the aviator represents "normalcy raised to heroic proportions." For the Roth family, however, the situation is anything but normal, and heroism has a different meaning. As the anti-Semitic new president cozies up to the Third Reich, right-wing activists throughout the nation seize the moment. Most citizens, enamored of isolationism and lost in hero worship, see no evil–but in the Roths' once secure and stable Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey, the world is descending into a nightmare of confusion, fear, and unpredictability. The young narrator, Phil, views the developing crisis through the lens of his family life and his own boyish concerns. His father, clinging tenaciously to his trust in America, loses his confidence painfully and incrementally. His mother tries to shield the children from her own growing fear. An aunt, brother, and cousin respond in different ways, and the family is divided. But though the situation is grim, this is not a despairing tale; suspenseful, poignant, and often humorous, it engages readers in many ways. It prompts them to consider the nature of history, present times, and possible futures, and can lead to good discussions among thoughtful readers and teachers. Bibliographic sources, notes on historical figures, and documentation are included.–Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Philip Roth's huge, inflammatory, painfully moving new novel draws upon a persistent theme in American life: "It can't happen here." That's how we express our longing to believe that our ideals are too strong to be shoved aside by some cruder impulse, and our nagging fear that our democracy is too fragile to withstand assault by the muscle of fascism. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis took the familiar phrase as the title for a novel that depicted the seeds of totalitarianism sprouting in a small New England town; It Can't Happen Here is not among Lewis's best works, but it was widely read at a time when Americans were becoming apprehensive about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and when it was translated into German the Nazis banned it, implicitly acknowledging its power to sway people's minds. Now, with the United States at unceasing risk of terrorist attack and with many Americans fearful that civil liberties are being compromised as the government attempts to fight terrorism, Roth gives new currency to the old phrase -- indeed, deliberately employs it as The Plot Against America approaches its climax. "It can't happen here?" a prominent American politician asks a large audience in New York City in October 1942. "My friends, it is happening here . . . ." The Plot Against America brings the sum of Roth's books to more than two dozen. It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined. This is saying something, when one considers the storms of hilarity and outrage set off by Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth's masturbatory comedy; Our Gang (1971), his burlesque of the Nixon administration; and The Human Stain (2000), in which he ranted against the "enormous piety binge, a purity binge," when President Clinton's opponents seized upon the Monica Lewinsky affair to conduct a noisy crusade in which, in Roth's view, "the smallness of people was simply crushing." It says a great deal about Roth that when he accepted an award from PEN, the international writers' organization, not long after the publication of The Human Stain, it was this provocative passage he chose to read to the assembled literati at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Roth is a defiant provocateur who gives whole new universes of meaning to the phrase "in your face." He simply cannot resist any opportunity to scratch an existing wound or cause a new one. At the Folger, as it happens, he was preaching to the choir, and the reception was warm. The response to The Plot Against America almost certainly will be something else altogether. Leaving aside the novel's subtext, which gives every appearance of being an attack on George W. Bush and his administration, consider the premise upon which it is constructed: that in the presidential election of 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt is soundly defeated by the Republican nominee, Charles A. Lindbergh, who immediately signs nonaggression treaties with Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan, and then institutes a succession of programs "encouraging America's religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society" -- programs clearly intended "to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections." As events unfold, it becomes clear that the administration embraces, and intends to enforce, "the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority," the "precept at the heart of Lindbergh's credo and of the huge American cult that worships the president." Lindbergh is a venerated (though often misunderstood) American who, after the controversy aroused by his prewar isolationism and his September 1941 speech denouncing the Jewish "influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government," turned to less heated matters and became an elder statesman; the success enjoyed by A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh: A Biography (1998) is testimony to his continuing hold on the American imagination. So one hardly needs clairvoyance to predict that The Plot Against America will be greeted in many quarters with fury, not just by political conservatives but by ordinary people who still see Lindbergh, in Roth's words, as "normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice who had resoundingly demonstrated to the entire planet the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history and, of course, the power to transcend personal tragedy." Certainly it is understandable that some people will refuse to read The Plot Against America because its depiction of Lindbergh offends them, but the loss will be theirs. This is not a novel about Lindbergh (or Roosevelt, or Henry Ford, or Fiorello LaGuardia, or any of the other historical figures who appear in its pages) but a novel about America: the complex and often contentious mix of people who inhabit it, its sustaining strengths and its persistent vulnerabilities, its susceptibility to demagoguery and anti-democratic impulses. It is also a novel about living amid the turmoil and unpredictability of history, about people's powerlessness "to stop the unforeseen," or, as its narrator says: "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." The man who says those words is named Philip Roth. He is an adult now -- age unspecified, presumably the same as that of the author, who turned 70 last year -- but the story he tells takes place when he was a boy between the ages of 7 and 9. As did the author himself, he lives in Newark with his mother, father and older brother, in a tightly knit lower-middle-class Jewish community where, by 1940, "Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs." That Roth has chosen for the umpteenth time to write fiction as imagined autobiography will annoy some readers, as it annoys me. The fixation on self has always seemed to me the greatest weakness in his work, one that has kept him from fully realizing his amazing literary gifts because it personalizes and narrows everything it touches. But for once in his fiction, the self is less important than the world outside. The Plot Against America is far and away the most outward-looking, expansive, least narcissistic book Roth has written. The effects upon young Roth of the imagined events of 1940-42 obviously are of interest and importance to him, but the real core of the book is family, community and country, and the consequences for all these of America's flirtation with fascism. It is useful for the reader in 2004 to bear in mind that America in the early 1940s was a very different place. It was a time of "unadvertised quotas to keep Jewish admissions to a minimum in colleges and professional schools and of unchallenged discrimination that denied Jews significant promotions in the big corporations and of rigid restrictions against Jewish membership in thousands of social organizations and communal institutions." Many "prominent Americans . . . hated Jews," most blatantly and influentially Henry Ford, Burton K. Wheeler (the senator from Montana who "becomes" Lindbergh's vice president) and Father Charles E. Coughlin, the bigoted, incendiary radio preacher. Many otherwise decent ordinary people saw Jews only in stereotypes and were deeply prejudiced against them. So, in The Plot Against America, when Lindbergh gets 57 percent of the popular vote in 1940 and wins every state except New York and Maryland, the country's 4.5 million Jews are put on notice. Philip asks his father, Herman, what Lindbergh means when he talks about "an independent destiny for America," and the answer is chilling: "It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for." It means the Office of American Absorption and something called Just Folks -- "a volunteer work program for city youth in the traditional ways of heartland life" -- through which Philip's brother, Sandy, spends a summer on a farm in Kentucky owned by a man named Mawhinney: "It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it -- generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to -- while my father, of course, was only a Jew." A stereotype, to be sure, but Mawhinney, it turns out, doesn't quite fit the stereotype. Sandy positively adores him -- a source of deep bitterness between him and his suspicious, fretful, chip-on-the-shoulder father -- and in time he does the Roth family an act of surpassing generosity. Later still, singular heroism is committed by the person closer to the president than anyone else, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an act given expression by her in words of genuine nobility. Sometimes stereotypes contain truths about people, but people -- Jews, gentiles, whatever -- aren't stereotypes. If Lindbergh and his followers can't see beyond them, neither can Philip's loving, protective, energetic, irascible father. Nobody is immune to bias and misunderstanding. One of the things the haters can't see is that Herman Roth and his friends in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark are Americans every bit as much as they are Jews, and that it's just as American to be a Jew as it is to be a Christian or a Muslim or an atheist or anything else. The point is made in a moving passage that deserves to be quoted at length, because it is the core of the novel: "They raised their families, budgeted their money, attended to their elderly parents, and cared for their modest homes alike, on most every public issue thought alike, in political elections voted alike. . . . These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language -- they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be 'proud' of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of -- what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences."When Philip's mother, Bess, urges Herman to take the family to Canada, he shouts: "I am not running away! . . . This is our country!" She sadly replies, "No, not anymore. It's Lindbergh's. It's the goyim's." But the whole brunt of the novel is that he is right and she is wrong, however difficult and dispiriting may be the task of sustaining it. The "malicious indignities of Lindbergh's America" are very real and cannot be glossed over -- in a country with a nativist streak as wide and deep as our own, it really can happen here -- but after bringing the country to the edge of the abyss, Roth mercifully and properly allows it to step back. That Roth has written The Plot Against America in some respects as a parable for our times seems to me inescapably and rather regrettably true. When the fictional Lindbergh flies around the country "to meet with the American people face-to-face and reassure them that every decision he made was designed solely to increase their security and guarantee their well-being," the post-9/11 rhetoric of George W. Bush is immediately called to mind, as is the image of Bush aboard the aircraft carrier when Roth describes the "young president in his famous aviator's windbreaker."The ephemera of politics have never struck me as fit raw material for the art of literature, and nothing in this novel changes my mind on that count, but there's so much of greater value and importance in it that dwelling on Roth's attitudinizing is pointless. His politics are as reflexive and tiresome as those of most other artists, literary or otherwise, and the best thing to do is to shrug them off. As to his treatment of Lindbergh, it is an imaginative leap that I find hard to make, but it isn't rooted completely in imagination. Lindbergh did make public statements that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and he was indeed chummy with some very high-ranking Nazis. It is curious, though, and not much credit to Roth, that his supplemental list of suggested reading for people "interested in tracking where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins" does not include Reeve Lindbergh's memoir of her parents, Under a Wing (1998), in which, after describing her own horror at reading the 1941 speech for the first time when she was in college in the 1960s, she reflects upon her father's stubbornness and insensitivity and finds him more innocent than guilty. I am inclined to think that she is right, and that Roth should have put a fictitious crypto-fascist in the White House rather than offering a somewhat cartoonish riff upon a famous but naive and excessively self-assured man who didn't always connect words and consequences. Choosing pure fiction over "historical imagining" would of course have been considerably less sensational than putting the revered Lindbergh in the driver's seat, and the possibility that Roth had shock value in mind cannot be dismissed. What he has done is, after all, in-your-face to the max. Still, it's Roth's book and thus Roth's choice. Besides, in the end he softens the blow with an interesting rewrite of history that casts Lindbergh in a less unfavorable, more vulnerable light. Still, the real story in The Plot Against America is that of the Roth family, which the author gives to us as a genuinely American story, about a family that undergoes absolutely wrenching internal warfare and external perils, and that comes out in the end like one of those plug-ugly New Jersey boxers who occasionally make cameo appearances in Roth's work: battered and bruised, but still on two feet, still fighting. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
In 26 books, Roth has painted panoramic views of America’s social landscape, from neurotic Jewish-American families to 60s-era cult figures. (See our Book by Book profile on Philip Roth, July/Aug 2003.) Plot Against America casts a politico-historical lens on the fear and uncertainty experienced by a young Philip Roth, the semi-fictional narrator. The novel, at once a suspenseful thriller, family drama, and coming-of-age story, speaks to the devastating forces that entangle the individual with history. Paranoia? Check. Endangered freedoms? Check. Mob violence? Check. Denial? Check. In this risky genre, Roth took chances that paid off. A few reviewers even call Plot Against America his most powerful novel to date. The best parts revolve around family emotion as Roth—older, sadder, and wiser—recounts how he, as a child, lost faith in his father’s power to right observed wrongs. The author is an impressive historian; fact and fiction merge as pogroms threaten Jews, conspiracies run amuck, a Walter-Winchell-for-President campaign launches, and the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. At times, this wealth of historical detail overwhelms the family’s dramas. Leaving the fabricated premise behind for just a moment, some events—including Lindbergh’s baby kidnapping—seem plain implausible. The author’s own politics, although less self-consciously present than in previous novels, can also interrupt the fictional Roth family’s challenges and contemplations. Others criticized a clever but abrupt finale, despite a bibliography, historical chronology, and short biographies of real-life figures. And, a few critics never quite bought into the “what if?” premise. Yet, as Roth suggests, history repeats itself, moving on without our permission and co-opting us in the process. In the end, Plot Against America is an “epic, unforeseen and unexpected” (San Francisco Chronicle)—just like history.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From AudioFile
Unlike anything Philip Roth has written before, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA is a thought-provoking novel hypothesizing what would have happened had the anti-Semitic Charles A. Lindbergh been elected president in 1940. Written from the perspective of Roth as a 7-year-old boy, the book demonstrates how easily a president's policies can shatter democracy. Ron Silver, who sounds like he grew up in Newark, is an ideal choice to read the book. Silver's New Jersey accent sounds as natural as the emotions he expresses. He is especially convincing in conveying the passion that permeates this novel. For example, when young Philip watches as his brother, Sandy, is co-opted by Lindbergh and his followers, becoming spokesman for a program designed to relocate Jews, Silver's voice is filled with sadness. In light of recent events, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA has generated much debate; it's a book worth hearing. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* In his new novel, Roth steps boldly into the difficult realm of alternate history. As he has it, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh is nominated for president in 1940 on a peace-with-Hitler platform and wins handily over FDR--the majority of the electorate fearing that Roosevelt intends to propel the country into the war currently raging in Europe. Of course, a large segment of American Jewry is frightened at the advent of Lindbergh into the White House; his friendship with the fuhrer could easily include acceptance or even adoption of the German dictator's anti-Semitic policies. Roth brings this provocative national situation down to a personal level by drawing the reader into the lives of the young narrator--called Philip Roth--and his Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. How the Lindbergh presidency divides the family, since each member must "determine the response sensible for a Jewish family to take," is the specific focus. In particular, Roth isolates young Philip's reaction when his immediate world is plunged into turmoil he both understands and doesn't quite understand. There are occasional breaches in the "what-if" conceit, from which escape faint whiffs of gimmick, but the overall effect of the novel is staggering. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertains to war--the central question always being, Do we protect humanity beyond our borders and see our soldiers come home in body bags? This magnificent novel is both appropriate to today's headlines and timeless for its undermining of the blind sentiment that "it can't happen here." Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Ever the innovator, Philip Roth enters a new genre at the age of 71. This alternate history novel marks a major, but logical departure for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In The Plot Against America, isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. The victory of the Lone Eagle generates successive waves of anti-Semitism, culminating in nationwide pogroms. From Newark, New Jersey, Roth's recurring character Philip and his Jewish family struggle to chisel out a safe place in this maelstrom of hatred.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family-and for a million such families all over the country-during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Wells Glueck

A mature novel by a preeminent writer

This perceptive novel by a highly educated man of letters and preeminent American writer is based on what in eighteenth-century England was known as a "conceit" - i.e., a concept, a hypothesis, fully developed and logically pursued - to wit, that the famed and idolized aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who was also known as a Republican, a pacifist, an appeaser, and an Aryan supremacist, won the U.S. presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term in office and became a puppet and eventually (it was rumored) a captive of Nazi Germany. The elaboration of this conceit not only caricatures Lindbergh as a reticent stoic who "every few months summoned the gregariousness to address his ten favorite platitudes to the nation" (does this sound familiar?) but extends to such anomalies as a Jewish woman from the slums of New Jersey dancing with Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at a White House reception; or a learned rabbi running the Office of American Absorption, which - abetted by companies like Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that in the 1930's and 1940's were hardly known as equal opportunity employers - resettled suburban American Jews in rural hamlets where there was neither demand for their skills nor tolerance for their religious beliefs; or the murder of radio newsman Walter Winchell for his diatribes against the Lindbergh administration. In sum, this novel persuasively and memorably depicts what might have occurred had the Henry Fords, Father Coughlins, and other Nazi sympathizers of the era prevailed.

Paul Berman - The New York Times

Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel, though in a style his readers might never have predicted... a fable of an alternative universe, in which America has gone fascist and ordinary life has been flattened under a steamroller of national politics and mass hatreds. Hitler's allies rule the White House. Anti-Semitic mobs roam the streets. The lower-middle-class Jews of Weequahic, in Newark, N.J., cower in a second-floor apartment, trying to figure out how to use a gun to defend themselves. (''You pulla the trig,'' a kindly neighbor explains.) The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.

Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post

Philip Roth's huge, inflammatory, painfully moving new novel draws upon a persistent theme in American life: "It can't happen here." … The Plot Against America brings the sum of Roth's books to more than two dozen. It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined.

Publishers Weekly

During his long career, Roth has shown himself a master at creating fictional doppelgangers. In this stunning novel, he creates a mesmerizing alternate world as well, in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and Philip, his parents and his brother weather the storm in Newark, N.J. Incorporating Lindbergh's actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war, Roth builds an eerily logical narrative that shows how isolationists in and out of government, emboldened by Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism (he invites von Rippentrop to the White House, etc.), enact new laws and create an atmosphere of religious hatred that culminates in nationwide pogroms. Historical figures such as Walter Winchell, Fiorello La Guardia and Henry Ford inhabit this chillingly plausible fiction, which is as suspenseful as the best thrillers and illustrates how easily people can be persuaded by self-interest to abandon morality. The novel is, in addition, a moving family drama, in which Philip's fiercely ethical father, Herman, finds himself unable to protect his loved ones, and a family schism develops between those who understand the eventual outcome of Lindbergh's policies and those who are co-opted into abetting their own potential destruction. Many episodes are touching and hilarious: young Philip experiences the usual fears and misapprehensions of a pre-adolescent; locks himself into a neighbor's bathroom; gets into dangerous mischief with a friend; watches his cousin masturbating with no comprehension of the act. In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations, and if the lollapalooza of an ending is bizarre with its revisionist theory about the motives behind Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, it's the subtext about what can happen when government limits religious liberties in the name of the national interest that gives the novel moral authority. Roth's writing has never been so direct and accessible while retaining its stylistic precision and acute insights into human foibles and follies. (Oct. 5) Forecast: With its intriguing premise and thriller-tense plot, it's likely that this novel will broaden Roth's readership while instigating provocative debate. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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