“Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?” a young Philip Roth asks his aunt. “I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop,” she bashfully replies. A young Jewish woman in the arms of Hitler’s Foreign Minister – that’s no cause for alarm in Philip Roth’s latest book, The Plot Against America. Instead, it’s a teenage fantasy come true: the political equivalent of a slow dance with the high-school quarterback.
In the New York Times review of Plot, Paul Berman declares, “Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel – though in a style his readers might never have predicted.” Nearly every review of the novel – and the reviews have been good – has concerned the striking differences between Plot and Roth’s previous works. In fact, Plot is so superficially different that Roth himself wrote an essay in the New York Times explaining why he embarked on such a project. But despite these protestations, what makes this book excellent is not its departure from Roth’s tried-and-true method; rather, it is the fact that underneath it all, it fits perfectly within his oeuvre.
It’s true that at first glance, The Plot Against America is a dramatic departure for Roth. Veering away from the self-reflecting psychotherapy that’s made him famous, Roth gives his readers a sweeping revision of twentieth-century history – an alternate timeline in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election on the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War.” Unwilling to become embroiled in World War II, America elects him, and he lives up to his promise – by allying with Nazi Germany. Suddenly, America’s own Jewish population is under threat. Like most Roth novels, thinly-veiled recastings of the author’s life, this one centers around a working-class Jewish family in a Jewish neighborhood of Newark. Unlike most Roth novels, this one eschews any pretense of disguise – the narrator is Roth himself, remembering a politically charged childhood that might have been.
Also notably absent is the depth of character that normally accompanies a Roth novel. American Pastoral’s “Swede” Levov inspires palpable jealousy for his nearly perfect life, and deeper sympathy for his fall from on high. Plot never asks the reader to develop such a complex a relationship with its characters. Herman Roth, Philip’s fictional father, evokes sympathy, decrying an anti-Semitic motel owner who refuses them a room for the night, “There is no one else, and if there was, why should we take a back seat to them?” But, forthright and earnest, Herman lacks the complexity one would expect from a Roth character, particularly a parent. From the mind that practically invented the stereotypical Jewish mother in the form of Sophie Portnoy comes a set of parents who are no more than simple, frustrated everymen. Perhaps Roth is unwilling to assign to his own family the neuroses he so readily attributes to others, but this does not fully account for the apparent lack of complexity in the rest of the characters, who read less like individual personalities than like single notes in the context of a symphony.
And it is in this symphony that Plot emerges as similar to Roth’s other books. While there is no individual as complex as The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk, or as fallible as the recurring Nathan Zuckerman, Plot has an entity that is both: the nation of America itself. The country develops through narrative like any protagonist, with FDR, Lindbergh, and the Jewish community as competing elements in its complex psyche. As Lindbergh’s agenda develops, America balances its fear of war with a fear of choosing a path that might harm the Jewish community. The populace itself creates excuses for questionable actions – Philip’s cousin Alvin points out that when Lindbergh gets a ringing endorsement from prominent New Jersey leader Rabbi Bengelsdorf, “He’s giving goyim all over the country his personal rabbi’s permission to vote for Lindy on Election Day.” America, knowing it is heading into questionable moral territory in electing Lindbergh, develops psychological defense mechanisms on a national level.
Roth’s construction of an alternate history is as meticulous as America’s character development. He bases his opening on historical record, constructing Lindbergh’s speeches from real public addresses he gave. Then, almost imperceptibly, he begins to leave the facts behind. We watch as the Republican convention, deadlocked for hours, fails to find a suitable candidate until Lindbergh flies in at 3am to heroically secure the nomination. Young Philip’s family, listening to the radio, recoils in horror. “Not him, anybody but him for President of the United States!” exclaims Herman. Plot climaxes when “Lindy” disappears and vice president Burton Wheeler begins issuing totalitarian edicts and arresting political rivals. America eventually reels itself back from the brink, but Roth makes us aware of how easy it would have been – or might still be – for a great democracy to devolve into something ugly.
Thematically there is little difference between the issues explored in Plot and many of Roth’s other novels. The Human Stain features a man who, after being removed from his post as dean at a small liberal arts college for allegedly making a racist remark, is revealed to have been hiding the fact that he was black since he was a young adult. American Pastoral tackles issues of assimilation and criminality; and in Plot, Roth is continuing his exploration of the concepts of otherness and discrimination.
When Philip Roth was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation in 2002, his acceptance speech bemoaned his status as a Jewish, rather than an American, author. This near-neurotic obsession with identity, both self-imposed and prescribed from without, permeates Plot – to Roth, it’s the most formative element in our lives. But rather than giving us a slice of that life, Roth narrates the whole pie. Positioning America as hero – or anti-hero – the author remodels history itself to fit in his own historic body of work.
