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The Plot Against AmericaEditions
ReviewThis book actually sweats with the presentiment of doom from the opening page. Seldom does one come across a story so well constructed and so deeply vivid in the world it creates that you find it difficult if not impossible to separate its ideas from historical fact. This is especially interesting here where the book is, in its premise, obviously false from the start. “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president and if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.” Charles H Lindbergh, the flying ace who thrilled the world in 1927 with his journey across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St Louis from New York to Paris. He became a national hero, famous the world over, a status deepened by the tragic kidnapping and murder of his child in 1932. He later played a prominent role in American life and was sent by the US military to Germany in the mid thirties to see how their air might was developing. He was, like many, favourably influenced by Hitler and later revealed both isolationist and anti-Semitic views as war in Europe became inevitable. Roth lifts this character, and many others around him at this time, and with horrifying ease turns the course of history in favour of Lindbergh running for office against Roosevelt in 1940, and then keeping America out of the war and starting Jewish persecution at home. He tells the story not at a distance, not in terms of the political figures, but from the point of view of his own family growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in an ordinary Jewish neighbourhood. The facts the reader knows of what really happened so wholly inform the horror of what the family think will happen, as their world begins to darken, that you actually find yourself ready to rant and beg at the page for this foolishness to stop. If Mailer is the aging pugilist of serious American letters and Vidal the patrician pope in waspish self imposed exile then Roth is surely the count. His style and craft are seamless, his power and scope as broad and certain as a biblical text. The genius of this book lies not in its brilliant evocation of a ‘what if’ from a great moment in the past, nor even in its exquisitely deft control of language, character and idea, but in the way it is, by definition, a vision of the possible dangers of our own time now…the way it reveals a fundamental weakness in our own, unchanging, greater character to ourselves. The plot, when it is revealed, is less than central in importance to the reader than the terrible truth of the dangers of our own vanity. “And as Lindberg’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 school children 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.” What does Roth think now as Bush takes ‘Four more years’ on the strength of his “Moral” values? Values against gay marriage, against abortion, against interests outside his own, totally uninterested in the balance of the rest of the world and of course he is appointed by God! Reading his book you would think Roth knew it all along. That there is a sliding in our spirit toward a darker complacency, toward a place where those who would, will take advantage of our foolishness. And here is he, on the brink of this chasm, shouting out his warning before our disaster is upon us. - review by Ulric Van den Bogaerde |
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