His Iron Cross gleaming on his dinner jacket, von Ribbentrop is guest of
honour at a banquet in the White House. In Reykjavik, Hitler and the
American president sign the Icelandic Understanding, cordially affirming
peace between their nations. Near Buffalo, bomb-shelters are built as
protection "in the event of a surprise Canadian attack". Packed
with unexpected scenes like these, Philip Roth's remarkable new novel is a
thoroughgoing excursion into the realm of alternative history.
This is imaginative territory that British novelists have often proved keen to
explore, envisaging life here under the Prussian heel (Saki's When William
Came) or Nazi rule (Len Deighton's SS-GB), as an outpost of a latter-day
Holy Roman Empire or a Soviet colony (Kingsley Amis's The Alteration and
Russian Hide-and-Seek). American exercises in the genre are thinner on the
ground — though in 1935 Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (a phrase that
pops up in Roth's novel) sensationally depicted the USA under a fascist
presidency where anti-semitism, torture and concentration camps thrived, and
liberals fled across the border to a resistance HQ in Montreal.
Infinitely more subtle, persuasive and unsettling than Lewis's shrill
alarm-call, The Plot against America takes a similar scenario and embeds it
in plausibility by using a real-life anti-semite and crony of Hitler — the
ace aviator Charles A Lindbergh — as its Nazi-sympathising president. In
June 1940, as Franklin D Roosevelt prepares to stand for an unprecedented
third term, Lindbergh (a national hero after his pioneering transatlantic
flight in 1927, and an object of national compassion after his baby son was
later kidnapped and killed) receives the Republican nomination. Campaigning
on an isolationist, anti-war ticket, he sweeps to victory. What ensues
unrolls with ominous credibility.
What-if fiction isn't of course a new departure for Roth. His 1971 satire, Our
Gang, portrayed a part-imaginary president, Trick E Dixon, waging war
against Denmark. Story-lines that zigzag between fact and fantasy have
(especially in Roth's novels about his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman) long been
a speciality. What his 1990 novel Deception calls "reality-shift"
fascinates him.
In other ways, too, The Plot against America seems a masterly summation of
earlier preoccupations. Roth's last three novels each showed an admirable
individual under siege from the worst aspects of an era: 1960s
counter-culture anarchy in American Pastoral (1997), the McCarthy
witch-hunts in I Married a Communist (1998), 1990s PC punitiveness in The
Human Stain (2000). The Plot against America carries this concern a
fantastic step further: the horrors of the 1930s are unleashed into a
might-have-been version of Roth's childhood. Autobiographical immediacy
gives his fictitious reign of terror gritty actuality.
The close-knit Jewish community within which he grew up in Newark, New Jersey
has always stirred Roth's imagination. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus
(1959), was eloquent about this lively, industrious neighbourhood. Numerous
subsequent novels drew their energies from it. In his memoirs, The Facts
(1988) and Patrimony (1991), it is handsomely commemorated. But nowhere are
the vitality and virtues of his boyhood locality celebrated more
compellingly than in this novel about a national nightmare. Chronicling the
first stages of a descent into Nazism, the book doesn't focus on all-out
Holocaust but on ever more insidiously disrupted and endangered family and
community life.
With Lindbergh in the White House, banked-down animosity to Jews begins to
surface. In one suspenseful chapter, Philip's parents, Bess and Herman, try
to keep up a reassuring semblance of normality by taking him and his older
brother, Sandy, on a holiday to Washington they have been saving a dollar a
week for over the past two years. Amid the grand reminders of America's
egalitarian founding principles, bigotry erupts. An ugly confrontation in a
cafeteria creates circumstances in which the family's remaining at their
table eating ice cream with pretended unconcern constitutes an act of
heroism. Herman's indignation results later in eviction from their hotel.
Astutely, Roth shows his rabid right-wingers cloaking anti-semitism in
down-home cosiness. Under the Just Folks programme (aimed at "introducing
city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life"), 12-year-old
Sandy is dispatched on a summer "apprenticeship" to a farmer in
the Deep South. By May 1942, as the Homestead 42 scheme swings into
operation, Herman is being heavily invited to relocate to Kentucky ("a
challenging environment steeped in our country's oldest traditions, where
parents and children can enrich their Americanness over the generations").
Herman's resistance to this — and his subsequent drop from hardwon
professional status as an insurance agent to labouring on a market for his
boorish brother — are affectingly registered. So is the unshowy courage with
which he braves pogroms and a terrifying rescue expedition into the South. A
shining tribute to the values Roth sees his parents as embodying — decent
aspiration, civic optimism and responsibility, tolerance, respect for
learning and desire for betterment — the novel displays Bess and Herman,
under horrible pressure, striving to keep anxiety from their children. Much
of this book about a menacing president is a paean to parental
protectiveness. Herman doesn't only shield his sons but shelters two
orphans. In a harrowing replay of a comic episode in which young Philip,
having accidentally locked himself into a bathroom, is talked down from
rising panic by a classmate's mother, Bess saves a terrified boy during a
night of violence by a soothing, motherly long- distance phone call. In
marked contrast to the swarm of harpies, perfidious wives, vengeful
hysterics and crazed feminist neurotics who have agitated his recent novels,
Roth pays warm tribute to maternal fortitude as well as paternal strength in
the face of threat.
"Fear" is his novel's opening word; "frightening" chatters
through its closing pages. One of the ways in which it has a post-September
11 resonance is in its emphasis on the shock of losing a sense of safety.
First-generation American Jews see the terrors that hounded their
predecessors closing in on them; children perceive that their elders aren't
invulnerable.
Roth never lets things simplify into a crudely clear-cut fable. Ironies and
ambivalences richly complicate his novel. There are anti- semitic Jews such
as Philip's Aunt Evelyn, bedazzled by her marriage to a leading collaborator
with the regime, pompous Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who speaks "so softly that
at times you had to hold your breath to hear how learned he was". The
fight-back against fascism isn't only waged by Jews such as the demagogue
broadcaster Walter Winchell and half-Jews, such as New York's mayor,
Fiorello La Guardia. When an Italian family is moved in next to the Roths as
part of the Good Neighbour Project (designed to dilute Jewish communities),
they cheeringly prove to be just that. The farmer the returned Sandy
appalled his parents by idolising turns up trumps, too. Roth is famously an
author who likes to shock. He has never done so to more purpose nor written
with more humane power than in this brilliantly troubling and heartening
novel.
THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth, Cape £16.99 pp391
