As Philip Roth notes in the methodical historical postscript that closes his latest novel, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidential election of 1940 by a landslide. Four hundred and forty-nine electoral votes, in contrast to Wendell L. Wilkie’s 82, brought him a third term. When he died — at the beginning of his fourth term — in the spring of 1945, my mother, born like Roth in 1933, the year after the beginning of his first term, was stunned: how could anyone other than Roosevelt ever be president at all?

In The Plot Against America, the answer is simple. Roosevelt loses the election of 1940; loses it to the aviation hero and “America First” isolationist, Charles A. Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic in The Spirit of St Louis in 1927, when he was a 25-year-old mail pilot, had brought him worldwide fame. Lindbergh, who in 1938 accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazi Government, plans to keep America out of another European war; and for the Jews of Newark, New Jersey, the world — the America they knew, and felt a part of — becomes a very different place.

Among those Jewish families are the Roths: Herman, an insurance salesman; Bess, his wife; Sandy, their elder son, and Philip, the younger son; as the novel begins Philip is 7 and Sandy is 12. In other novels, Roth’s alter-ego has been Nathan Zuckerman; judging the distance between the novelist and his fictional counterpart sometimes felt like a game. But The Plot Against America closes this distance. Perhaps as a result the novelist’s empathy, his humanity — which has often been subservient to his rage — comes to the fore. This is a book full of fury; and while Roth has said quite explicitly that this is not a “9/11 novel”, it certainly casts light on the present through the window of the past.

But its pleasures, and its terrors, lie in the agonisingly vivid portrait of a family whose never-before-questioned closeness and stability is nearly sundered by the events that surround them. “A new life began for me,” Roth writes when his cousin Alvin, who had run off to Canada to join the British in the fight against Hitler, returns to live with the family — minus one of his legs.

“I’d watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood.” His parents are no longer parents, in control of events; they are powerless against the unforeseen. “And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned the 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 disaster into an epic.”

The Plot Against America is an epic built — painstakingly, passionately, nearly perfectly — of the small structures of the particular. In the aftermath of his wounding, Alvin’s weight drops precipitously; “Hearing this, I wondered how much the leg weighed that he’d lost, and that evening, without success, tried to weigh mine on the bathroom scale.” Particularly affecting is the portrait of Bess — perhaps the most rounded and powerful female figure the novelist has created. Two parallel scenes — one in which Philip is rescued (he has locked himself in a bathroom) by a neighbour’s mother, and one where his own mother, in far more terrible circumstances, comes to the rescue of that very neighbour’s own son — give us Bess, and her son’s idea of Bess, with great emotional power. Nothing in this novel, at the level of the personal, is not utterly convincing: Philip’s mystification, his mother’s continual striving to keep things as they had always been, his father’s impotent anguish, his talented elder brother’s seduction by the new regime.

If there is a failing here, it is on the larger scale. Lindbergh’s victory over Roosevelt is almost hastily sketched. It could be argued that Roosevelt’s real victory was so complete that any alteration to the record is untenable; it could be argued, too, that over this crucial event Roth simply stumbles, almost seeming to rush through a monumental transition. This haste could have threatened the author’s contention that, yes, it could have happened in America: the separation of families, the threat of pogrom, the danger that haunted Jews across the centuries and from which they thought they had, in America, in New Jersey, finally escaped. Recent history, however, reminds us that events are not inevitable; they are made up of the unforeseen and the unbelievable. It is the unforeseen and the unbelievable, brought up hard against the personal, that brings “History” alive. In a sense, this very weakness is what reveals the overriding strength of this dark, humane masterpiece.

Did I say masterpiece? I take it back. Roth is at the peak of his powers; and he may have more for us yet.

Read on

- The Human Stain and American Pastoral, both by Philip Roth (Vintage)

- Lindbergh by A.Scott Berg (Macmillan)

- Fatherland by Robert Harris (Arrow)

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, £16.99; 391pp

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