THE REIGN OF ROTH

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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.

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.