The Plot Against America

On this side of the Atlantic we often joke that the Yanks joined both world wars somewhat late. The assumption behind this jest is that no-one could possibly not wish to fight against such an evil force as Nazism. So it's easy to forget how close the US was to staying out of the war and standing by at the behest of a large part of public opinion as western civilization was incinerated. There was a robust opposition to joining the war which the pro-British Roosevelt cleverly sought to sideline but which was eventually confounded by Pearl Harbour in 1941 and the subsequent German declaration of war.

This is the scenario which Philip Roth uses as the context for this remarkable novel. What he imagines is a USA where isolationist forces actually win through and defeat Roosevelt in 1940, setting in train a period in US history, analogous perhaps to that of Soviet Russia after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. But the real theme of the novel, apart from exploring the limits of this possibility, is anti-semitism in the USA.



He imagines an America neutral in the war but so benign towards Hitler that some elements of his anti-semitism are allowed entry. To assist this invention he uses two devices. First, he chooses Charles Lindbergh, the legendary, much loved and famously isolationist transatlantic aviator, as the person who dramatically sweeps the 1940 Republican Convention and wins the presidency on an anti-war ticket.

Second, he locates the action within his own family, living in the largely Jewish Weequahic part of Newark, New Jersey. So the novel is partly autobiographical, covering his early life with father Herman and mother Bess, together with their extended family and neighbours. Roth's descriptions of real life characters from his family and neighbourhood are as sharp and clear as crystal, and the book teems with life and authenticity.

His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and rose to district manager, the highest a Jew could rise before the passing of the Fair Employment Act after the war. Herman was a passionate supporter of FDR and hoped he would take his adopted country into the war against Hitler. His rants against Hitler the US anti-semites and for the FDR suffuse, enthuse and divide his family. All this is conveyed realistically, but with the twist of the invented political circumstances.

Roth's brother Sandy joins a Lindbergh administration scheme to disperse Jews to the rural areas and returns to enthral large Jewish audiences. His adopted brother Alvin rejects such appeasement and flees to Canada where he joins up, is injured and returns to try and re-adjust to a society slowly swinging towards an anti-semitism which is never far below the surface.

Roth reserves his bitterest criticism for those Jews who take the easy option and try to vitiate the threat of the new regime by adapting to it and supporting it. The plight of the Jews continues to get worse as the Jews' spokesperson the radio journalist Walter Winchell, is murdered by neo-fascist zealots.

Roth apparently writes while standing up and walking around, calculating that he walks half a mile for each page written. His sentences stride out long, controlled and fluid. Here is just one which I chose virtually at random, describing a mounted policeman at work in the street:

They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who'd been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle to place the ticket under the car's windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.

The book sustains its interest but Roth has a problem in that he seems to shy away from the unthinkable outcome implicit in his plot: that the US becomes a fascist ally of Nazi Germany. The narrative therefore implodes a little as it reaches the middle years of the war in Europe where this reader found disbelief a little harder to suspend.

But this is a magnificently vivid slide show of a society emerging from extreme hardship, like so many other immigrant groups in US history. This most private of authors has allowed his readers a privileged peep into his past and into a deep, murkily dark recess of American society.