- Roth, Philip.
The Plot Against America.
New York: Vintage, 2004.
ISBN 1-4000-7949-7.
-
Pulitzer Prize-winning mainstream novelist
Philip
Roth turns to alternative history in this novel, which also falls
into the genre
Rudy Rucker
pioneered and named
“transreal”—autobiographical fiction, in
which the author (or a character clearly based upon him) plays a major
part in the story. Here, the story is told in the first person by the
author, as a reminiscence of his boyhood in the early 1940s in Newark,
New Jersey. In this timeline, however, after a deadlocked convention,
the Republican party chooses Charles Lindbergh as its 1940
presidential candidate who, running on an isolationist platform of
“Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war”, defeats FDR's bid
for a third term in a landslide.
After taking office, Lindbergh's tilt toward the Axis becomes
increasingly evident. He appoints the virulently anti-Semitic
Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior, flies to Iceland to
sign a pact with Hitler, and a concludes a treaty with Japan
which accepts all its Asian conquests so far. Further, he
cuts off all assistance to Britain and the USSR. On the
domestic front, his Office of American Absorption begins
encouraging “urban” children (almost all of
whom happen to be Jewish) to spend their summers on farms
in the “heartland” imbibing “American
values”, and later escalates to “encouraging”
the migration of entire families (who happen to be Jewish) to
rural areas.
All of this, and its many consequences, ranging from trivial
to tragic, are seen through the eyes of young Philip Roth,
perceived as a young boy would who was living through all of
this and trying to make sense of it. A number of anecdotes have
nothing to do with the alternative history story line and may
be purely autobiographical. This is a “mood
novel” and not remotely a thriller; the pace of the
story-telling is languid, evoking the time sense and feeling
of living in the present of a young boy. As alternative
history, I found a number of aspects implausible and
unpersuasive. Most exemplars of the genre choose one specific
event at which the story departs from recorded history, then
spin out the ramifications of that event as the story
develops. For example, in 1945 by Newt Gingrich and William
Forstchen, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany does not
declare war on the United States, which only goes to war
against Japan. In Roth's book, the point of divergence is
simply the nomination of Lindbergh for president. Now, in the
real election of 1940, FDR defeated Wendell Willkie by 449
electoral votes to 82, with the Republican carrying only 10 of
the 48 states. But here, with Lindbergh as the nominee, we're
supposed to believe that FDR would lose in forty-six
states, carrying only his home state of New York and squeaking
to a narrow win in Maryland. This seems highly implausible to
me—Lindbergh's agitation on behalf of America First made
him a highly polarising figure, and his apparent sympathy for
Nazi Germany (in 1938 he accepted a gold medal decorated with
four swastikas from Hermann Göring in
Berlin) made him anathema in much of the media. All of these
negatives would have been pounded home by the Democrats, who
had firm control of the House and Senate as well as the White
House, and all the advantages of incumbency. Turning a 38
state landslide into a 46 state wipeout simply by changing the
Republican nominee stretches suspension of disbelief to the
limit, at least for this reader, especially as Americans
are historically disinclined to
elect “outsiders”
to the presidency.
If you accept this premise, then most of what follows is
reasonably plausible and the descent of the country into
a folksy all-American kind of fascism is artfully told.
But then something very odd happens. As events are unfolding
at their rather leisurely pace, on page 317 it's like the
author realised he was about to run out of typewriter ribbon or
something, and the whole thing gets wrapped up in ten
pages, most of which is an unconfirmed account by one of
the characters of behind-the-scenes events which may or may not explain
everything, and then there's a final chapter to sort out the
personal details. This left me feeling like
Charlie Brown when Lucy snatches away the football;
either the novel should be longer, or else the
pace of the whole thing should be faster rather
than this whiplash-inducing discontinuity right
before the end—but who am I to give
advice to somebody with a Pulitzer?
A postscript provides real-world biographies of the many
historical figures who appear in the novel, and the
complete text of Lindbergh's September 1941
Des
Moines speech to the America First Committee which documents
his contemporary sentiments for readers who are unaware of this
unsavoury part of his career.
November 2006 