The Plot Agianst My Sleeping Habits
The Plot Against America has been much discussed, here and elsewhere, and it made most critics’ Best of 2004 lists. I don’t have much to add to all that bloviatin’, but I wholeheartedly agree that this is One Very Important Book. I normally steer clear of counter-factual history (”What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War?!”). I tend to disdain the genre nearly as much as I do comic books, but this one really got under my skin (in part because it was only barely counter-factual).
The counter-factual premise here is that Charles Lindbergh (a fascist sympathizer in real life) ran against and defeated FDR in the 1940 election, and that he then kept the US out of WW2 and put into motion something of a Final Solution-lite for American Jews.
I won’t discuss any more of the plot, because I can’t without giving it away to those who haven’t read it, but I will say that I found the book utterly compelling when I thought of Roth’s Lindy as a homegrown fascist, and much less so when he was shown to (maybe) be something else. The plot of Plot struck me as about 5 degrees off of historical reality through most of the book, and it literally kept me up at night; the founding idea of this book ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. I found it impossible not to believe as I read it that it really could happen here. And not just in the past.
Roth’s portrait of young Phillip’s family will stick with me for a long time. Phillip’s parents are absolutely heroic. As a father, I’d like to think that I would make some of the same decisions Phillip’s parents made, even given all of the grief those decisions may have caused the family.
July 24th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
First off, who you callin bloviatin’? I will MEET you!
Second off, what does “counter factual” mean? I suspect in your line of work the meaning is fairly clear. Is it bullshit? Is it fiction? Is it anything that deviates from the facts? All of the above?
March 25th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
[...] I think (?) this has been reviewed before but as a quick recap - this book recreates history by envisioning that Charles Lindbergh wins the U.S. presidential election in 1940 and brings his anti-semitic and isolationist views to the forefront of American politics. Roth tells the story from the point of view of an adolescent Jewish boy living in New Jersey. The book’s redeeming quality was that it was told from a young boy’s, Philip Roth, perspective. What I enjoyed about the book was all the angst Philip went through trying to maintain familial relationships with his mother, father, brother and “war-hero” cousin. One review that I read said that Roth should have kept the book as an adolescent Jewish coming of age story and I agree. The lengthy discourse on the Lindbergh politics and all the players involved in this fictional history really didn’t interest me because I know that it was completely made-up and therefore hard for me to envision. I think though that the struggles that Philip had in determining what his beliefs were and how this affected his relationships were and still are relevant without the made up history part. Overall - a decent read and I definitely predict - future movie….a la Human Stain. [Since you asked, there have been two previous posts on the book (here and here) and another on the subject matter (here), ed.] [...]