The Plot Against America

We bought Philip Roth's The Plot Against America right after it came out, and I started reading it then, but somehow got distracted, both by what seemed an opening that was dictated by the overall historical setup of this alternative history, and by some reviews that deflated my enthusiasm enough to cause me to put the book down fifty pages in and not pick it up again for a year. Reviews will do that, even if I don't have any idea of whether the reviewer shares my tastes, thinks like me, etc. (That's the thing about "good" rhetoric -- it's effective on a primate level even when one is attempting to resist its irrationality.)

When I finally did give the book another try, I found it enjoyable and deep, though it still carries the baggage of Roth's trying to imagine a different route through the years leading to and through World War II. But over and above all of that "political" stuff (and it is by no means "political" in the formulaic way most politically correct fiction is now -- it's not, for example, an attempt to directly parallel a fictitious Lindbergh fascist presidency to Bush's terms in office) The Plot Against America reads as a memoir, of a time and place, and of a child's understanding of what his parents are and what they are able to do in the world, for themselves and to protect him. The book is an absolutely essential counterpoint to all the other pictures Roth has given of his parents, many of them comic and seemingly unsympathetic. Here he finds the heroic in the imagined actions of his father and mother under circumstances that never happened -- but what if they had? I tried to make the case to Jenny after reading this book that much of Philip Roth's moral vision has to do not with what people actually end up doing, but what they have the potential to do -- a potential that can only be explored through the medium of fiction, and best through the expanse of something like a novel, where the full case in all its ambiguity can be made.