THE REIGN OF ROTH

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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. •