Product Description

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. Lindbergh had publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany. Then, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he also negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. Praise for "The Plot Against America": ""The Plot Against America" is an epic, built - painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly - of the small structures of the particular. A dark, humane masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers" - "The Times". "The word genius doesn't seem excessive - utterly plausible. "The Plot Against America" creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism" - "The Guardian". "Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive" - "The Guardian".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7414 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Released on: 2005-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
"'The Plot Against America is an epic built - painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly - of the small structures of the particular. A dark, humane masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers' The Times"

From the Publisher
‘The Plot Against America isan epic built – painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly – of the small structures of the particular. A dark, human masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers’ The Times

About the Author
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral.In1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, Philip Roth will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last ofthe eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Customer Reviews

Almost perfect, but....
I'm surprised that some reviewers found this book uninvolving and hard to get through. I found myself identifying strongly with the Roth family (and I'm neither Jewish nor American) and couldn't put the book down.

On the other hand, I'm a history graduate with a particular interest in the 1940s, and I can see that someone not familiar with the history of the period might miss a lot.

I also agree with the comment from Matt Diamond that the plot twist that Roth uses to get history "back on track" is implausible and unsatisfying, for which it gets docked one star.

All that said, the book is superbly written - Roth is brilliant on character, especially the dynamics of families, and can turn a paragraph expertly from wit to tragedy and back again better than virtually anyone else writing today.

Perhaps not quite his best - I recommend "American Pastoral" if you want a real five-star read, but this is excellent nonetheless.

Counter-factual history, thankfully
This is a remarkably convincing counter-factual history of the United States between 1940 and 1942 and how it impacted on the seven to nine year old boy who was Philip Roth at the time. In that version of history, the 1940 presidential election was won by the American folk-hero and aviator Charles Lindbergh on a programme of keeping the United States out of the war against Hitler into which Roosevelt was thought to be steering the country. Lindbergh subsequently met Hitler in Iceland to seal American neutrality. That fact made many Jews, including Philip's father, accuse Lindbergh of being an antisemitic fascist, and that in turn made those Americans who wanted to keep out of the war accuse the Jews of wanting to drag America into it, and fanned antisemitic feelings to such an extent that Jews came to feel very insecure.

In actual history, Lindbergh was indeed something of an admirer of Hitler and had been awarded a decoration by him, and he was a prominent member of the America First Committee, founded to oppose Roosevelt's interventionist polices and to promote American isolationism. Historically also Lindbergh had been disturbed by the influence of Jews in the media, and he did single out the Jews as a pressure group trying to push America into the war.

In the novel, Lindbergh's antisemitic policies are much subtler than Hitler's: he simply sponsors programmes to make them 'more American' by inducing them to move out of the strongly Jewish areas on the East coast into the Mid-West. A prominent Jewish rabbi is a confidant and a regular visitor to the White House, and he defends the President against the charge of being antisemitic; the press carries a letter from Mrs Lindbergh to the rabbi in which the First Lady pays tribute to the great spiritual strength of the Jewish people. Towards the end of the novel we find an ingenious, if rather far-fetched, invention which explains this moderation, and which it would be a spoiler to reveal in this review. In any case, Lindbergh's more strident Jewish opponents, most prominent among them the journalist and broadcaster Walter Winchell, are not convinced. (The novel is full of American public figures who really existed). Nor must I reveal the way in which the author eventually brings the novel to a point where the real history we know can be resumed (which, incidentally, forces Roth to misdate Pearl Harbour).

But before American history is 'back on track', we do see an America in which the sense of menace is growing and in which Jews do indeed come to be in deadly peril, with pogroms, riots, and murders. And one feels it could really have happened like this.

Against this background we have the life of the child Philip, in which he has many other things to think about than the political situation which so involves his parents and the older members of his family. The sense of danger does get through to him, of course, but at times we are as much involved in the importance of his stamp-collection, his relationship with his elder brother and his cousin, the tricks he gets up to with a school friend etc. So although this is primarily a political novel, it is at the same time a novel about childhood preoccupations, and a compelling read on both scores.

Odd and frustrating
I can't say I got on with my first encounter with Mr Roth's work. I found this a curious piece, in large part coming across as biography - fine, if not that exciting - but then erratically conjoined with counter-factual history. The point of the two coming together somewhat escapes me, as the Lindbergh anti-semitism/pro-Nazism thing is skimpily drawn and doesn't intersect with the fictional characters satisfactorily. As noted elsewhere in the reviews, the conclusion of the Lindbergh plot stream is not well drawn. The whole thing seems to me to a device to pad out a moderately interesting childhood biography into something that seems far more significant. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the significance.

I also didn't particularly enjoy Roth's prose from a readability standpoint. Just not me I suppose.