I have seen the first episode of HBO’s film version of Phillip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America”. It is presented as a shocking tale of what might happen to Jews if Charles Lindbergh had been elected President of the United States in 1940. It is a dystopian vision that concentrates on dread and foreboding and does a lot of plot exposition while Roth tells a crisper tale that hinges on what is the difference between illusion and reality. Philip Roth must be laughing in his grave. He fooled the clucks one more time. They didn’t see the irony in his telling of his story, however adept he was at constructing a plausible story of the details of what would happen under and to a Lindbergh Administration. He was pointing out that America would come to the aid of its Jews rather than victimize them if a Nazi sympathizer came to power. So I am posting most of the review I did of the novel back in 2005, soon after the novel came out, for those who want an accurate account of what Roth was up to. (Beware. There are spoilers therein.)
Just a boy at the time of the war, Phillip Roth has finally written his World War II novel and called it “The Plot Against America”. Writers ten or fifteen years older than he served in the war and came home determined to write the big book about it. Norman Mailer, most famously, made his reputation with a sprawling saga that flashed backwards and forwards between combat in the Pacific and the sexual lives of the soldiers when they were on leave. All this was leavened with some philosophical talk so that “The Naked and the Dead” would take on a Tolstoy-like grandeur. James Jones, for his part, wrote ”From Here to Eternity”, which depicted the intersection of the marginal lives of both soldiers and prostitutes in pre-attack Honolulu so that the reader could understand what he took to be the nature of both civilian and military life.
A set of authors ten years older still, already well established, were only seemingly less ambitious. James Gould Cozzens wrote “Guard of Honor”, a portrait of an air wing in combat in the Pacific, the organization itself more of a protagonist than any of those who served in it. The book went into how difficult it was to keep the machinery of war going, and also provided a rather candid account, and this from the point of view of a white defender of traditional race relations, of the politics of introducing Negro airmen into the service. William Saroyan wrote “The Human Comedy”, a sentimental portrait of the home front that featured a teenage boy coming of age delivering telegrams from the War Department which notified families that a soldier had died.
Phillip Roth takes his cue from the obvious precursor, Sinclair Lewis, who had written an alternative history about a Fascist takeover in America during the 1930’s. Roth posits an alternative history and his protagonist is a youngster whose disposition is anything but the sunny one of the lead character in Saroyan’s novel. Phil Roth, the character, is a timid, overly sensitive boy given over to his fantasies and his fears. He suffers from panic attacks it is not clear he will ever outgrow and it is not clear that the whole supercharged plot to destroy America is not a product of a febrile imagination that projects onto history the paranoid quality of the Jewish community in which he lived. That this may be the case is kept in delicate equipoise by Roth, who never even indicates that is the case, yet produces his story as a set of chapters made up of how a young boy might unwittingly misunderstand the events that are going on about him.
Roth deploys an irony befitting the Central European master in that he describes absurd situations with both detail and a highly stylized manner that makes them at the same time macabre and funny or, as we have said for generations now, “Kafkaesque”. The success of Roth’s novel is that it reflects both the fears and the actualities of the late Thirties so well that we become engrossed in the external story of politics more than in the story of the narrator. That Roth seems to be abandoning the novelist’s trade for that of the science fiction writer just shows how well he is accomplishing the job of getting us to see the world through little Phil’s way of thinking.
Every chapter, as in “The Castle”, is a set piece, elaborating another part of the fantasy, without itself required as part of the story line, which hangs outside the story, to be brought back in only like the trial that takes place at the end of “Alice in Wonderland”, where things have gone so absurd that the project has to be abandoned as no longer in touch with reality. An early chapter sets the post-modernist tone, the reader expected to understand how the allusions tell how the material is to be read, what kind of fiction it is. The Roths go on a visit to Washington, D.C. to see the patriotic sites. The hotel where they plan to stay refuses to honor their reservations because they are Jews. A kindly man gives them an expert tour of the sights and shares with them his patriotic musings. A moving scene of an attack on the American Way righted until you notice that the scene of the hotel manager having a bell hop remove the Roth’s bags is straight out of “Gentleman’s Agreement”, the overheated Gregory Peck movie of 1947 about anti-Semitism, and that the kindly tour guide might be out of “Sullivan’s Travels” or John Dos Passos. The chapter is a set piece about people affronted enough so that they are given a chance to proclaim their love of America.
Roth is so very good at presenting a fantasy realistically that it is hard to tell what’s what. He did that in “The Counterfeit Life” to much comic effect. The protagonist of that novel has a mistress who cannot stimulate him even though she crawls to him wearing only a garter belt and stockings. Now, is the protagonist going through this unsatisfying experience, or is it his fantasy that he is going through this experience? Either way, whether as impotent or as exploitive, or as both, he comes across as a jerk who feels sorry for himself. The clue that the incident is to be taken as a fantasy is that it is too idealized a sexual fantasy. The clue that Roth is doing the same thing in “The Plot” is that his set pieces are also too perfect as setups for heightened rhetoric about the evils of anti-Semitism and the extent to which that evil lurks in the hearts of Americans.
There is a scene, set amidst the climactic outbreak of anti-Semitic rioting, when Phil’s aunt, the sexy lady who had married the Rabbi who had became an advisor to Lindbergh, the legitimately elected President of a never to be 1940. She had been thrilled to dance with von Ribbentrop at the White House, and now she comes to the door, begging to be taken in lest the anti-Semites who have taken over the White House and perhaps the country come after her. Phil’s mother turns her away at the door. She does this not silently, which would be melodramatic enough; she does it while providing a number of set speeches (amazing, considering how little space they take up) denouncing her sister for what she had believed and telling her she deserved what she got. It is the ultimate Jewish put-down: I told you what would happen if anti-Semites got into the White House. More generally, the harangue says the Jews just can’t trust the gentiles not to betray your confidence in them, and so you should always be wary, never having any confidence in them.
The scene buttresses the sense of both little Phil and the grown up little Phil who serves as narrator that his mother was a formidable person who lived up to the stereotype of the uneducated immigrant who nonetheless saw clearly into the dynamics of situations and knew how to handle things in a crunch, as when she got her husband to drive down to Kentucky, in the midst of the rioting, to rescue a little neighbor of little Phil who had been sent off to a gentile family to learn what it was to be an American, a program run by little Phil’s aunt. All of these scenes ring wrong, especially the one where little Phil’s mother kicks her sister out of her house. Under such circumstances, I would hazard, people would take in their kin, never mind whether they had agreed politically. Lives were at stake.
The riots serve as an excuse for an outbreak of inter-group solidarity. Roth describes how the gentile police chief in Newark has extra cops on the street to protect Jewish residents and how gentiles help their Jewish neighbors. And the person who rescued the little boy in Kentucky was the farmer who little Phil’s brother had stayed with and who little Phil’s mom had called for assistance, managing to make a long distance phone call all by herself, and therefore proving herself heroic. Maybe the riots weren’t as large scale or as historically significant as they seemed to be to little Phil, who did not know about zoot suit riots or other manifestations of anti-minority feeling that were going on at the time.
Maybe little Phil’s father had been wrong to think everybody was out to get the Jews, which was why he gave up his reassignment out of Newark by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. He saw it as part of a pogrom, and so he ghettoized himself further, taking up a job with a relative in the declining Jewish economy. Everywhere west of the Delaware River was enemy territory, and you could only wait till they came to get you and put you on trains, though that image is not available to little Phil or little Phil’s family, while yet very available to the reader. After all, except for the foreboding, what was wrong with the farm little Phil’s brother went to? It was a place to assimilate immigrants. The Fresh Air Fund did and does much the same thing without the proviso that the only minority group to be reeducated from a life of poverty is the Jews. Every minority group goes, whether in sequence or at the same time. The Lindbergh program was the New Deal addressed only to Jews Only little Phil and the Germans would imagine it necessary to declare a law that made only one minority group eligible for a program far less benign than the one provided by Lindbergh.
Other pieces of the carefully worked plot can be parsed in the same way, even if Roth, the author, goes easy on the internal politics of the Lindbergh administration, thinking that we know politics and important people through the media, which is also Woody Allen’s perception in “Radio Days”. Roth is not a science fiction author in that he is not interested in the wheels within wheels that motivate “Dune” or the Foundation Series or most of Heinlein. Rather, the media tell little Phil and the reader enough to figure out that what happened to Lindbergh is… well, never mind. A not too plausible future history, which suggests that future history was not the author Roth’s intent, especially since, we learn fairly early on, history is restored to what we now take it to have been fairly early on, so much so that the dates of fictional history are soon enough in sync with the dates of “real” history.
So what motivates the fantasy? It is all set in little Phil’s imagination, who awakens to the thought that on his stamp collection there might be the superimposition of swastikas, to indicate some kind of takeover of the United States by the ultimate forces of darkness. Little Phil lives off and from these fantasies. In their service, he is devious and timid, overlooked while attention is paid to his talented artist brother. His mother, to her surprise, does come to notice what a piece of work he is, and perhaps he works his way out of his preoccupations or his insanity by the time the fictional form of history and the real historical account reconcile. You know only that little Phil had been overwhelmed by his parents paranoia while his brother, always more independent, had not been, nor had the Rabbi and his aunt, who saw that they could work within America, become comfortable with America, for all of its hypocrisies, for all the bad feelings that have to be swept under the table to keep relations between groups civil.
Phillip Roth has again gotten the best of his critics, though this time he does it so well that they do not even know what he did to them. Fifty years ago, Roth was something of an issue for the Jewish community because he told tales out of school. He wrote a story about Jewish soldiers who are insistent on having their religious holidays respected and when that happens they go off to use their freed up time for their own pleasures. People said he hated his people. It was nothing about nothing, given that the story was funny and that, as the expression then went, a new literary voice was emerging. Jewish writers had a certain éclat that first passed to African American writers and then to Asian and gay writers and I don’t know who is next. What is amazing is the extent to which Roth has come into his own over the course of time as a significant rather than merely a topical writer of the moment (while Updike, for example, who was always serious, just became more wonderful.)
What happened this time was not a vindication since it was all topsy turvy, the critics saying he had written a novel about anti-Semitism, and had, if anything, laid it on too thick, which would have been quite satisfactory to his critics of long ago. What wasn’t said by the critics was that he laid it on so thick that it wasn’t plausible and so had to be read ironically. There was no plot against the Jews. As the title of the novel suggests, there is this fictional plot against America and everything that America stands for, which is religious tolerance and the blessings of liberty, a plot that is resisted largely by the gentiles themselves. The plot against America fails because the American people are basically good folks, and Jews need not be afraid of them, even if that is not the message that preoccupied a good part of East Coast Jewry during the Second World War. It is true that America did not fight the Second World War to save the Jews; it is true, however, that they joined Churchill in his fight against Hitler, albeit somewhat tardily. It takes Americans a while to wake up, but when they do, they come out on the side of right.
So little Phil (and, perhaps real Phil) did not have what was at the time called “a good war” even though he was just a boy and stayed at home. He shared with much of East Coast Jewry a great unease, some mixture of anxiety and fear that America would not come out on the side of right, that America would go the way of their European cousins, that a great apocalypse would befall the Jewish people. And, of course, that is just what happened, except that it did not happen here. The point of the novel is that such an outcome was much too far from the American sense of things; somehow, it would not be allowed to happen.
Roth’s novel was published before the 2004 election. “The Plot Against America” is a roman a clef. The capable candidate, Al Gore, had not won the 2000 election over someone clearly unqualified for the job whether by a fluke or through a process which not even its enablers on the Supreme Court would recommend as a precedent for the way to handle future elections. Maybe the American people put aside their good sense because Al Gore was such a stiff or as an act of revenge against Clinton for having inflicted Monica upon the American consciousness. Either way, they bought or had bought for them a pig in a poke, and hoped for the best. The same thing happens in Roth’s novel. Lindbergh, the well known unknown, beats FDR because, as in the election of Arnold Swarzenagger as Governor of California, maybe we should try something a little different and maybe that way we will stay out of the European War. It turns out, in the novel, that Lindbergh was too much: too cozy with the Nazis, too full of his own solitude. It was time to return to politics as usual—which is an idea that Americans, in real life, have never abandoned. However limited are the people they elect, Americans expect politicians to be politicians, trimming and tripping over themselves, rather than saviors. The European countries, in the Twentieth Century, went for a number of Millennialist figures, and it will take them a long time to live that down.
And so, before the 2004 American elections, it was reasonable to suppose that the American people would come to their good senses and resoundingly rid themselves of an administration well known, even by the networks, for its lies (about weapons of mass destruction) and its incompetence (in getting the war in Iraq to work) and for its inability to be eloquent about anything, including its giveaways to its friends, this slight of hand done in broad daylight so no one could claim anyone was sneaking around, which would be evidence that someone was doing something wrong. Kerry was no great shakes, not much smarter than Bush (quite a standard), and given to equivocation. But he would offend nobody and the President’s negatives would be enough to get Kerry elected. To the shock of many, including myself, it did not turn out that way. Roth must also have been shocked because he staked his confidence in the American people on their ability to right their electoral wrongs. To change tenses on Bob Dole, “Where was the outrage?”
So those of us who share Roth’s view of the goodness and good sense of the American people have to lick our wounds, and find excuses. It wasn’t the radical right that won the election. It was to the benefit of the incumbent that we were at war and the American people don’t want to switch horses in midstream, which is what Lincoln said about his re-election. Evidence for that interpretation of the electoral vote is that the Republicans did better in every region of the country. They got more votes even where they lost. If the radical right had been the inspiration for the victory, then they would have scored much more heavily in states with heavy evangelical populations than elsewhere. So the Bush reelection was a fluke.
Well, so much for excuses. Bush, so obviously a failure as a President, as well as so obviously limited as a person who could represent the Presidency, was re-elected, after all. Roth’s novel is worthwhile if for no other reason than to recall the shock of all that from the viewpoint of the moment before it happened, when it still didn’t have to happen. And so, whatever it says about Jews and their psyches, the novel reveals the historical moment in which it was composed and not just about the historical moment whose cultural atmosphere it so vividly recreates. This is something usually said only of novels long after they are published, as when we read Dickens for Victorian sentiments on the poor and for a description of how law courts and London neighborhoods and prisons for bankrupts actually worked as well as for the way people dressed up for what are now his costume dramas, operas in the form of prose. Fantasies, it also must be said, are also always of the moment. Our sense of things begins in dreams whose topics may be sex but whose dream work is borrowed from history and our hopes for the social world. Roth has made a career of nicely working the two off of one another.