"La storia è tutto ciò che accade dappertutto."

Si supponga per assurdo che non sia Franklin Delano Roosvelt a divenire presidente degli Stati uniti nel 1940, ma lo divenga Lindbergh, filonazista, isolazionista, antisemita.
Si supponga che in quegli anni al potere stiano i simpatizzanti di un movimento (peraltro realmente esistito) che si chiama American First Committe.

Non è difficile immaginare dove conduca il percorrere di questa ipotesi.

Roth punta l'obiettivo su un nucleo famigliare ebreo ed in particolare sui pensieri del più piccolo dei rappresentati di questa famiglia, che casualmente si chiama Philip Roth, all'accadere della vita sua e di chi gli sta intorno.

La storia in sé è credibile, i personaggi ben costruiti, il clima cupo e opprimente. Inquieta ritrovare nelle pagine allarmanti parallelismi con l'attualità (con le dovute differenze del caso).

Ma. Il libro per me è risultato incredibilmente faticoso. Dispersivo. Farraginoso e affrettato nel finale, e, soprattutto, molto freddo e poco coinvolgente. Pure lo stile di Roth, per me sempre difficoltoso ma di grande soddisfazione a completamento lettura, in questo caso non mi ha lasciato alcuna gratificazione.

Senz'altro un libro intelligente, che ho apprezzato solo in parte. Forse non l'ho trovato così originale o forse non era il suo momento

3.08.2020 - Finita la serie TV ispirata al romanzo di Roth. Davvero molto riuscita, mi ha pure fatto rivalutare il libro (in meglio)

CAPOLAVORO

I love Roth so it's always a treat to read his work and I had missed this one so I felt obliged to read it. Especially now as our "America first" nightmare has come to fruition. It's a good, clever story. It's haunting to read today. The one problem here is that he draws out this alternative universe of racism and forced removals and violence against Jews. But what he doesn't mention is that in the era he is discussing, in the real non-Lindberg presidency history, there was still anti-semitism, but also lynchings of black vets, japanese internment camps and all sorts of race crimes. So it would have been awful if we had gone down this imagined route, the reality was not super great.

The past causes the present, and so the future.

Reading The Plot Against America in the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election is to experience many things:

It is a masterclass in prominent mid-century American identities who publicly held views that are now at the forefront of our current cultural and political climate--a climate where "America First" is a thing again.

It is the helplessness of a warning unheeded.

It is the frustration that even this book, no matter how prophetic or sharp, could imagine how plausible its own story could be.

The events that make The Plot Against America an alternative history are ultimately set right, lacking the teeth and foresight the first two-thirds the book had.

Celebrity-turned-politician/fascist mouthpiece Charles Lindbergh  hops on a plane and disappears, and with him antisemitic rioting and hate crimes stop. Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected for his third term and the United States enters WWII on the side of the Allies. Everything is fitted into its correct historical slot, with little change or repercussion.

In our present, where just days before I finished this book President Trump referred to an American reporter of Jewish ancestry as "sleepy eyes", it is not as easy as that. We have seen and are seeing the devastating effects of allowing hatred to have a national platform. It has created a change in the American public that has deadly and lasting consequences.

While I do still think The Plot Against America is a timely and important read, there is a different ending we as modern-day Americans must create.

n  Reality in the Makingn

Is there a more obsessively repeated question than “what if”? We ask it when we regret past actions, we ask it when we are frustrated by unexpected results, we ask it when we dream of changes. It is true, we rarely ask it to wonder whether things could have turned worse. Except for authors, of course, with their habit of diving straight into nightmares.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is just this kind of a “what if” turned bad. Written in the style of non fiction novels, it looks so much like a historical memoir that you frequently have to remember that the events you are reading about never truly happened in those troubled times of the World War Two. A disquieting feeling of a disaster in the waiting, maybe because even though so far away, America did not entirely escape either the Nazi propaganda nor the blindness in front of the evil and so, under slightly changed circumstances it could have easily followed another way.

Hence the eerie “almost-true” impression that this powerful novel leaves the reader with, an impression masterfully amplified by the perfect blend of real and fictive events, personalities, family members, that creates a parallel reality so overwhelmingly real (so to speak) that it is quite difficult to think of it as fiction, since almost all the events are historically verifiable, and almost all characters, either from public or family life could have a double in reality. Moreover, as I already said, the events are presented in the form of a memoir (a genre supposed to increase the authenticity feeling in readers’ perception) – that is, the memories of a 9-year old Philip Roth, but reconstructed by an older narrative voice, none other than his own mature self that subtly corrects and completes his recollections, while trying not only to recreate the dire times through the eyes of a little boy, but also to recapture the innocence of the childhood.

The result? An almost historical novel (I think the word “almost” has got the starring role to describe it), a poignant story, told in a tranquil, equal tone that challenges the reader to deny it, either on the historical or the personal point of view.

The historical evocation goes back to the troubled forties to call into question not only the famous Jewish question but also the standing power of democracy as a guarantee of the human rights. I thought for a little while that The Plot Against America is a daring mixture between a non-fiction novel and a dystopia, but I think Keith Gressen (His Jewish Problem) coined it better as a “counterfactual Holocaust novel” or better a ”Holocaust anti-novel”, for it extends that Nazi fascination to “the land of the free”. And how immune is America to tyranny and dictatorship? How equipped is it to resist the seduction of a Stalin or a Hitler? These are the questions Philip Roth’s novel mercilessly asks, and how could the answer be a definite no when everybody thought, at least once, while reading his book, that although the story did not happen to Jews, it happened often enough to blacks. So who is to say this never happened? Therefore a subtler question suddenly arises: how are we supposed to interpret History – what is History really about?

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

As for the personal touch, the microcosm as a blueprint of the macrocosm, it is known that the historical novels usually turn a real event into a more or less verifiable story, giving life to a name, making-up details, decanting the events through a personal filter. Here, the filter is a sensible boy who innocently swings between boyhood and adulthood, like another Anne Frank who tries to make sense of family and world, sometimes with an unexpected touch of humor in an otherwise gloom enough narrative:

War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night,

However, usually his voice is reserved and distant, hiding both the anxiety of the boy and the anger of the adult under an almost academic tone that approaches the narrative to a philosophical essay with a disturbing premise:

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

It didn’t happen. Yet. But will it? Or rather when?

The Plot Against America is a novel that seems to have been given a 2nd life in the Age of Trump, one with parallels to today's political climate, one in which a certain segment of American society calls for easy solutions to complex problems, celebrates nativism & isolationism while seeming to denigrate the diversity that has been a feature of this country's development.



Philip Roth's novel displays a sense of history merged with a fictional overlay that mines what was the pre-Trump version of the America First movement as orchestrated by a young American hero with no previous background in politics, Charles Lindbergh. At least for me, the novel's premise was full of potential but its development & conclusion somewhat unconvincing.

The tale begins within a Jewish enclave of Newark in 1940, a compact, insular neighborhood peopled by unaccented, mostly non-observant & nearly assimilated Jews, families whose point of definition seemed to come from their work rather than their religion or their ethnicity. The novel's main character is the author himself, a boy whose worldview is in part keyed to his stamp collection.



Initially, there is a soft & gentle quality to the novel but the proposition of a Lindbergh election seems to fly in the face of perhaps the most beloved sitting president in American history somehow being defeated by an iconic "fly-boy" who was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927, somehow upending FDR just as America was on the verge of entering WWII & most certainly in need of political stability rather than a political unknown with a high-pitched voice. For me, this was a "trespass on credulity" & caused the story to unravel.

Yes, the U.S. did intern Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor & so the Lindbergh-inspired Republicans might have attempted to pass a "Homestead Act" restricting & "resettling" American Jews but my own sense of the period is that a solidly Democratic congress would never have gone on board with either the isolationism of the America First movement or the disabling restriction of its Jewish citizens.

The various German-American Bunds with loyalty to the Nazi Party and the venomous anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish fervor of the KKK & other groups were never considered to be a particularly dominant force.

After the attack on Hawaii in December 1941, America became quickly united as never before and while the Lindbergh election in the fall of 1940 would have predated this attack, I don't believe the United States would have been any less aggressive in opposing Hitler & Japan even if FDR had not been elected to a 3rd term as president.



Charles Lindbergh, "the most idolized man in America" as Edward R. Murrow put it, did make anti-Semitic comments, as did others at the time & there was a residual level of sympathy for the man after his child was kidnapped & murdered in 1935, by a German immigrant as it turned out. And Hitler did praise Lindbergh for his isolationist stance, naturally seen as a benefit to the Third Reich which feared the looming military prowess of the U.S., even awarding "Lucky Lindy" a controversial medal.

Many Americans were war-weary following WWI & even some Jewish-Americans were against participation in another world war. As the author conveying Lindbergh's words intones:

A few far-sighted Jewish people stand opposed to intervention but the majority still do not. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests but we must look out for ours. We cannot allow the prejudices of other peoples to lead our country into destruction.

Roth has a Rabbi Engelsdorf represent the view of the non-interventionist Jews, befriending President Lindbergh, while other Jews accuse the rabbi of "Koshering Lindbergh". However, the America First movement & the spirit of isolationism dissolved completely almost immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

What I did enjoy in Roth's tale was the interweaving of real characters such as Water Winchell, the author's recollections about his own childhood and the attempt to make sense of being a Jew in a country that was posited on at least a nominal belief that Christianity was the cornerstone of American life. Here is just one sample:

"What do you think Jesus is?" I whispered back that I thought he was their God. "And Chief of the Angels" he said looking up at a Christmas display. This then was the culmination of our quest--Jesus Christ, who by their reasoning was everything and who by my reasoning had fucked everything up: because if it weren't for Christ there wouldn't be Christians and if it weren't for Christians, there wouldn't be anti-Semitism and if it weren't for anti-Semitism there wouldn't be Hitler, Lindbergh would never be president & if Lindbergh weren't president....

The section of the novel dealing with family life in Jewish Newark in the early 1940s where there were "no beards or skullcaps & ten times more customers for the Racing Form than for the Jewish Daily Forward" represented some of the most memorable prose, the blending of fable with fiction + memoir at a time when the lines dividing Jewish areas from Gentile neighborhoods constituted the "known world" for a young boy.

And when the boy's father is awarded a much-desired promotion that would substantially enhance the family bank account but which might take the close-knit family away from the familiar boundaries of their area of Newark, he declines.



Philip Roth won many awards during his long writing career & The Plot Against America is seen as one of the late author's best efforts but the novel comes with some serious defects in my opinion. That said, I was glad to have read the book & hope to read more of Roth's fiction. And in light of Mr. Roth's recent demise, I've decided to change my initial appraisal from 3 to 4 stars, awarding the book an extra star by way of a reward for a distinguished literary career.

*Within my review are 2 images of author, Philip Roth; the image of Charles Lindbergh at an America First rally; a Dr. Seuss caricature of the America First agenda.

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth lovingly re-creates the lost world of the Jewish community of mid-century Newark, the world of his own boyhood. Then he takes the main characters, modeled on himself, his friends and his family, and tortures them by forcing them to live through state-sponsored Nazism in America.

Roth imagines an America in which Charles Lindberg defeats FDR in1940 by pledging to keep the US out of WWII, then immediately signs non-aggression pacts with both Germany and Japan, and presides over a climate of creeping authoritarianism and anti-Semitism in the US. The story is told through the eyes of a seven year-old boy—Philip Roth--part of a lower-middle class Jewish family in Newark. The Roths are strivers living in a tightly knit community of other lower-middle-class Jews. The novel illustrates the destructive effects of the climate of fear unleashed by Lindbergh’s election by showing what happens to this particular family and the community of which they are an integral part.

Plot is a kind of speculative historical fiction, but it faces some of the same problems that bedevil traditional historical fiction: how to accurately and convincingly recount the historical context without turning the novel into a research dump, and without completely breaking the narrative spell. Roth is only partially successful at this. The novel is beset with jarring juxtapositions of narrative tone, as he stops the action to set up the context, and then plunges the reader back into the narrative proper, and the rapidly unraveling world of the Roths.

Roth faces the added challenge of convincingly narrating historical events that did not occur, and making them flow seamlessly out of those that did. In this he’s much more successful. He wants to show the reader that, though fascism did not take root here, it might well have. History is only inevitable in retrospect. It’s almost always, to some degree, radically contingent while it’s happening. Unless you believe that all events are preordained, either by a higher power or by some kind of inexorable structural logic, then you have to hold open the possibility that even though things without question turned out the way they did, they might well have turned out differently. In the end, Roth returns the nation to its actual historical path, and the fascist interlude that he narrates is but a temporary swerve, but he does succeed in convincing the reader—at least this reader—that the history of the US at mid-century might well have taken a darker turn. Consider the following:
-At the time the US had its own officially sanctioned system of apartheid. Blacks in the south were denied the right to vote and were forced to use a separate but decidedly unequal set of public services. Their second-class status was codified into law. In 1940, Americans already lived in a country where an officially sanctioned racism buttressed a social system in which a despised minority was denied equal access to employment, education, public services, and political influence.
-Anti-Semitism was hardly unknown in 1940’s America—whether in the genteel version espoused by the WASP establishment or the cruder versions adhered to further down the social scale. America in 1940 was a country in which many if not most Americans at least entertained the idea that some social groups were either naturally inferior to white/Christian Americans or were superior in a potentially diabolical way, and were at least passively supportive of a political system that limited their political and civil rights. And these attitudes and forms of discrimination applied, to a lesser degree to be sure, but nevertheless, to Jews as well as blacks.
-In the novel, Lindberg defeats Roosevelt by espousing a very simple message: I will keep the US out of war. There was plenty of isolationist sentiment in the US after World War One. Americans may or may not have been appalled by Hitler’s persecution of the Jews of Europe, or worried by Germany’s aggressive military expansionism, but it took Pearl Harbor to convince Americans to enter the war--an attack by Japan, not Germany. Had Japan not attacked the US, the country could have tolerated a lot more systematic murder of European Jewry before intervening. Also, remember that it wasn’t until after the war that the defining fact of Word War II, in the popular imagination at any rate, became the systematic campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Perhaps the best one can say is that necessary but not sufficient conditions were in place for a fascist swerve. Also, I suspect that in showing us how fascism might have come to America, Roth is also showing why it didn’t.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the book was that, ultimately, the reader never knows just how real the plot against America actually was. In the end, the book dissolves into rival, tabloid-style conspiracy theories. And because the narrative voice is that of a 70 year-old man remembering events that took place when he was 8 or 9, and because the question of just what motivated Lindbergh is never answered in the “reality” of the novel, and because the things that the narrator can reveal are constrained by what he perceived then and knows to be true now, no definitive version of events can be rendered. If Roth had chosen to adopt the voice of the truly omniscient narrator he’d be able to penetrate the consciousness and observe the most intimate and secret thoughts and actions of other characters—everyone from Philip Roth to Charles Lindberg to Adolph Hitler--and to render some kind of definitive version of events—at least within the universe of the novel. Plot feels more plausible than most historical novels precisely because it never renders a definitive version of events. It dramatizes how little, ultimately, we understand the historical forces that shape our reality.

I made it halfway through this book and probably won't pick it up again. Frankly, it's boring. There's too much fictionalized memoir and not enough plot, let alone "plot against America." Also: unconvincing in every way. It doesn't take much for me to believe that Charles Lindbergh was a terrible person, but it takes a lot more for me to believe that he actually became president. And it's hard for me to take any of this seriously when the protagonists glorify people whom I think are also terrible:

* Abraham Lincoln - believed whites were superior to blacks
* Woodrow Wilson - KKK supporter, segregationist; allowed a personal rift to get in the way of his presidential duty, thus collapsing the Treaty of Versailles
* FDR - signed the Executive Order that interned Japanese Americans and other people of "enemy" descent

Aside from these petty disagreements, there simply isn't enough imagination here to drive forward the alternate history. I might as well reread a skewed high school history textbook.

When Roth is good, he is so very good. This book was sheer entertainment. Roth has such a marvelous imagination and knack for conjuring credible emotional and conversational dynamics. I think back to Herman's officiousness with Mr. Taylor, DC tour guide extraordinaire, and of Philip getting locked in the bathroom, and of Selden perseverating about his birthday party and the clarity of the long-distance line in the midst of the Louisville riots--everything is just so perfectly constructed and believable.

I couldn't help wondering, wryly, about how different this book might have been had it been written in 2017 instead of 2004. Roth is painstaking in his portrayal of the ascent of Lindbergh as a rational, sober, and dispassionate choice only tangentially and incidentally connected to the racist regime of the Nazis. He resists the urge to portray Lindbergh as a vitriolic messiah who rides to power on a wave of bile cultivated through inflammatory rhetoric and unstatesmanlike conduct.

Oh, to live in a time when such a conceit was necessary to preserve verisimilitude!

Η αληθοφάνεια, ο ρεαλισμός και η οξυδέρκεια με την οποία παρουσιάζεται ένα σενάριο εναλλακτικής ιστορίας εδώ φανερώνει ένα πολύ δυνατό μυαλό από τον Ροθ, αλλά αυτό το ξέρουμε ήδη οπότε δεν θα αναλωθώ σε αυτά.

Αυτό που με προβλημάτισε, παρόλο που το βιβλίο είναι καλό, ήταν η έκταση της ιστορικής περιγραφής ή της εξιστόρησης του background context σε βάρος της μυθοπλασίας και των χαρακτήρων, με αποτέλεσμα πολύ ενδιαφέροντα ευρήματα ή στοιχεία να μην εκμεταλλεύονται επαρκώς. Ένα πολύ ελπιδοφόρο ξεκίνημα κάνει τελικά πλατώ μετά το πρώτο μισό ή 1/3, δραματικές εντάσεις δεν αποδίδονται, η ιστορία της οικογένειας παρόλο ενδιαφέρουσα φαίνεται να μην πηγαίνει εκεί που θα μπορούσε να πάει. Και η γλώσσα στεγνή, υπηρεσιακή πολλές φορές, με ελάχιστη ενδοσκόπηση, συναίσθημα ή ποιητικότητα. Για να μην πω για προτάσεις 25 γραμμών όπου χάνει η μάνα το παιδί.
Δεν υπάρχουν εδώ οι κορυφώσεις και η αριστουργηματική δομή του American Pastoral ή το σασπένς του Human Stain.

Εξακολουθώ να θεωρώ τον Ροθ σπουδαίο, αλλά σε ένα πιο προσωπικό και υποκειμενικό note αυτό είναι μάλλον το τελευταίο του που διαβάζω. Έρχεται πια ο καιρός που όσο κι αν εκτιμάς η θαυμάζεις κάτι αρχίζεις και μπουχτίζεις. Προσωπικά έχω μπουχτίσει ελαφρώς με την ιστορία και τις αναφορές στην εβραϊκή κοινότητα του Newark για 100ή φορά, αλλά και όσον αφορά τα άλλα βιβλία με τον Κέπες κτλ, με το αφήγημα του αυτάρεσκου μεσήλικα πανεπιστημιακού που τον λιγουρεύονται 20χρονες φοιτήτριες, του self-absorbed και νάρκισσου αρσενικού.

Πάμε για άλλα λοιπόν, John Williams και Paul Auster τώρα στη λίστα.

What if the united states elected a president who's main slogan was "America First".
A "hero of the people" who would be against all the "leftist's" who want to get America involved in war.
A proven anti-Semitic who is looking to quarrel with Britain and Canada, and who in many cases seems to be an agent of the biggest dictatorship of all?

Sounds familiar? ….not so fast… this book was published in 2005 and takes place in the 1940's.

Philip Roth is describing a world where Charles A. Lindbergh is elected as the U.S president in 1940, based on a racist card. He appoints Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior, signs a treaty with Nazi Germany and Japan and starts oppressing the jews.

I found the book interesting and fascinating, the comparison with today's American administration is there but I would not say that there is a strong comparison.

Well written and realistic enough that, while reading it I looked up Lindbergh's and Fords political positions to see how much was truth and how much fiction.

Even when Philip Roth writes a lesser novel, it still sticks out above the ordinary literary level. This novel is limping on two legs. First, it is a remarkable example of a ‘what-if history’. Roth goes back to the presidential election of 1940 and instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh wins, on the promise that he will keep America out of the war that is already raging in Europe. Lindbergh is a good friend of Nazi Germany, and therefore the Jews in the United States are particularly suspicious, especially the Roth family in Newark, where the small Philip Roth grows up. Because it remains relatively calm, the majority of the Jews around them acquiesce in the regime change or even work with it. Not so father Herman Roth, who believes in a conspiracy and is especially sensitive to the slightest indications of discrimination. And soon expressions of racism are popping up increasingly. Initially author Roth builds up this 'counter-history story’ quite slowly but suddenly in the last quarter of the book he pushes the accelerator in such an extreme way that it looks rather unlikely and implausible to me.

Intertwined with this counter history is the story of the little Philip Roth, in this book he is 7 to 9 years old. The author Roth has made a bit of a Tow Sawyer story of this, a coming of age-novel with all the trivial things that occupy an upgrowing boy. From a literary point of view this was a little disappointing to me because it contrasted with the gigantic, complex and tragic figures Roth has put on the stage in his previous novels. Still, in this book Roth outlines quite captivatingly how fear gradually takes over the life of the family Roth, and especially of the little boy Philip. This focus is worked out in the last chapter, that matches the level of his best work. But as a whole, and certainly because of the extreme turn the story takes in the end, I found that this book remained below my expectations. (2.5 stars)