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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In his most believable novel in years, Philip Roth imagines a 1940s America where Charles Lindbergh unseats FDR and the nation descends into vicious anti-Semitism.
Sep 29, 2004 | When, in 2002, Philip Roth won the National Book Foundation's medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the most august lifetime achievement award he's likely to receive unless he's called to Stockholm for a Nobel Prize, he devoted his acceptance speech to a long and cranky argument about his right to consider himself an American writer rather than a Jewish writer. This is Roth's oldest gripe -- that as an artist and a man he's been subjected to unfair claims on his loyalty and identity. And while it may seem regressive for a writer of Roth's renown to be swatting away such ancient reproaches (does anybody still make them?), his ability to keep old grievances alive is what fuels him.
All this makes Roth's latest novel, "The Plot Against America," doubly surprising. The book's premise -- what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism -- is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel's credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.
Roth's feelings of persecution have been the engine of much of his fiction, and for his readers it's always a complicated balancing act: Is the thrill of being swept up in his stormy wrath worth the suspension of common sense that's often required? The tirade about the Monica Lewinsky scandal that kicks off "The Human Stain," for example, has a certain Swiftian magnificence, but as a description of what happened in America in 1998 it is dead wrong. The nation was not caught up in a puritanical witch hunt; rather, Americans largely refused to be whipped into such a frenzy, in defiance of the best efforts of right-wingers and certain media figures. (Wallowing in a gleefully smutty gossip-fest about Bill and Hillary Clinton's private lives is another matter -- that's still going on, to judge from the covers of supermarket tabloids.)
Sexual persecution is the specter that really winds Roth's watch, but in an era of gay marriage and openly polyamorous households, it's hard to find a situation in which a heterosexual male of conventional proclivities can feel truly ostracized as a result of his sexuality. As a result, Roth has had to contrive some pretty preposterous scenarios, populated by an assortment of straw-man oppressors, in order to maneuver his main characters into a position in which they can be unjustly tormented. You can see all the strings and gears here, as in "The Human Stain," in which Coleman Silk is given a wife solely so that she can be hounded unto death by a university's administration and thus provide sufficient justification for Silk's foaming hatred of that administration.
With "The Plot Against America," we're asked to believe something far more dramatic: that our country could, under the right circumstances and under the influence of powerful demagogues, degenerate into hate-stoked rioting on the level of Nazi Germany's notorious Kristallnacht. Yet -- a dismal thought -- this is more plausible than the propositions Roth has been presenting us with lately. Roth's handling of the story is sober, considered and subdued, another surprise. Roth's fire-and-brimstone eloquence has hypnotized many a reader who might, in a less persuasive fictional climate, reject the paranoid fantasies he concocts. Here, where the threat is real (however speculative the "history" may be), he has abandoned his fury.
