The Reign of Roth

Eve

n with his 26th book about to appear in bookstores, Philip Roth is still revising. Now 71, Roth has won just about every major American award a novelist can win, but a casual suggestion — that he has been insufficiently cruel to one of his characters — gets him pondering. "I didn't think of something like that happening to him," he says, musing aloud. "I guess — you know, it's interesting that you bring that up. It's too late for me to make any changes — the finished book just arrived today — but I wonder what I could have done ..."

That little speech should tell you three things about Roth. First, he never stops working. He's coming off a millennial hot streak that includes three astonishing books — Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral and The Human Stain. For another writer, those would have constituted a distinguished career all by themselves. Second, he is constantly surprising — never forget (and perhaps he sometimes wishes we would) that this is the guy who wrote a novella about a man who literally turned into a gigantic breast. Third, Roth sees the world as a tangle of hypotheticals and what-ifs, of counterlives and forking paths and roads not taken. It is down one of those roads that his new novel lies. A chronic reviser, Roth is ready to rewrite history.

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The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin; 391 pages) began in early spring 2001 with a single sentence, not one of Roth's own but a chance comment by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who speculates in his autobiography that in 1940 some right-wing members of the Republican Party considered drafting the pioneering pilot Charles Lindbergh as a presidential candidate. "That's it," Roth chuckles over the phone, surprisingly relaxed and wry for a man who jealously guards his privacy. "That's all it took. It should always be that easy!"

That single seed, rooted in Roth's singular imagination, grew into an entire alternative world. The Plot Against America is set in a shadow country that never was, an America in which Lindbergh, an isolationist in real life, defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt to become the 33rd President of the United States of America. Armed with that premise, Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarro version of his hometown, mid-century Newark, N.J., where we encounter Roth's own family and Roth himself as a child, living under the Lindbergh Administration. "My little rubric that I would recite to myself," Roth says, "was 'Don't invent it, remember it.'"

Decked out dashingly in jodhpurs and flight goggles, Lindbergh runs on a single plank: he will keep the U.S. out of World War II. And he's as good as his word. Once elected, he makes peace with Hitler at a conference in Iceland, fetes German diplomats at the White House and establishes the chillingly plausible Office of American Absorption, a government agency aimed at "encouraging America's religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society" — in other words, forcibly breaking up Jewish communities and dispersing their members to rural backwaters per the novel's Homestead Act of 1942. Roth's delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we're 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.

Meanwhile, the national political drama is writ small in the subtle havoc it wreaks on Roth's family. This is one of the most personal books Roth has ever written. "People think I have, but I never really have written about my family on the nose before like this," he says. In The Plot Against America, the narrative is routed through the fictional Philip, 7, a hypersensitive, self-centered boy with a penchant, but not a talent, for running away from home. There's an aching warmth to Roth's rich portrait of the Jewish Newark of his youth, where the men play pinochle and the women mah-jongg, local punks go by names like Knuckles Kimmelman and Duke "Duke-it-out" Glick and everybody listens to Walter Winchell on Sunday nights.