The Reign of Roth

HOME FRONT: The Jersey Boy at his house in Connecticut

JAMES NACHTWEY / VII FOR TIME

• Share

(2 of 2)

But Lindbergh's presence in the White House puts pressure on Roth's family idyll, which promptly cracks. Philip lives in awe of his elder brother Sandy, but Sandy idolizes Lindbergh and thinks all the fuss over his repressive measures is hysterical Jewish paranoia, a view that drives their parents crazy. To make matters worse, Philip's aunt marries a collaborationist rabbi. As the noose tightens, Philip's father loses his job as an insurance salesman, and Philip's mother vibrates between stoic resistance, barely stifled panic and utter paralysis.

Most of this is fiction, but not all. "The legacy of the long chronicle of anti-Semitism was fear," Roth says. "I certainly felt it as a kid growing up in the late '30s and '40s." In fact, the ways in which politics impinges on domestic arrangements is the great subject of Roth's late period. Over the past decade, he has serially demolished households by means of McCarthyism (I Married a Communist), racism and political correctness (The Human Stain) and Vietnam (American Pastoral). "History comes into the house," Roth succinctly explains it. "I'm interested in that." It doesn't wipe its feet on the welcome mat either. Did Roth, while he wrote, ever wince at the ordeal he was putting his fictional family through? He did not. "I don't wince when I write," Roth jokes. "I wince in life."

It wouldn't be hard — in fact, it would be pretty easy — to read The Plot Against America as a political screed about contemporary America, lightly antiqued to look like a period piece. And it confuses matters further that Roth recently referred to President George W. Bush in the New York Times as "a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one." So is it an allegory or isn't it? "Well, it ain't," says Roth. "It's about an imagined America in 1940. Look, the immediate moment often colors reading — there's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think that's a lasting relevance that the book will have." Or, as Samuel Beckett put it, no symbols where none intended.

We live in America — the real America, thank God — so we're free to read however we want. But to read The Plot Against America as, say, a book about the reduction in civil liberties in the name of homeland security would be to drastically impoverish its rich complexity. In Roth's fiction, politics is an element that doesn't naturally occur in its unalloyed form. It's always getting confused and mixed up with shame and anger, baseball and sex. Philip's foxy aunt Evelyn is a stone-cold Lindberghite fascist, for example, but the little boy still gets a confusing, involuntary preadolescent hard-on when she hugs him. The Plot Against America is about how we experience history: dimly, through the dirty lens of our own trivial circumstances, and backward, without the benefit of hindsight. "The terror of the unforeseen," Roth writes, "is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."

The Plot Against America is a sobering novel, but it's not a bleak one. As with an optical illusion, the longer you stare at Lindbergh's fascist U.S., the more clearly you see a shimmering vision of the real America, outlined in negative space, and you feel the tenderness with which Roth regards its fragile greatness. "I think this book is wholly optimistic," Roth says. "You know why? It never happened! At a time when it might have happened, it never happened. That's pretty terrific, you know?" At 71, Roth may just have written his first love letter.