In 2004, Joan Acocella analyzed the far-reaching themes of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.”
Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of several of Philip Roth’s mid-career novels, is dogged by the notoriety of a book he wrote in 1969, “Carnovsky,” which told of a Jew reacting against his parents’ first-generation respectability by chasing shiksas around town and involving them in uncanonical sex acts. “Carnovsky” is a huge hit, and everyone assumes that it is autobiographical. “Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?” the Con Edison meter reader asks Zuckerman. “You are something else, man.
Roth’s new novel, “The Plot Against America,” opens in 1940, and at first it seems almost a memoir. In much of his writing , Roth has used details from his own life—that’s why people think his work is autobiographical—but here he goes further. The book concerns a family called the Roths: father Herman, an insurance agent for Met Life; mother Bess, a housewife; older son Sandy, twelve; younger son Philip, seven.
One of the glories of the book is its counterpoint of large and small, its zooming back and forth, from chapter to chapter, between world events and the reactions to them in the Roth household. On the night of the Republicans’ balloting, Weequahic is loud with radios, as tense Jews sit waiting to find out if a Nazi sympathizer is going to run for President of their country. When, just before dawn, they find out that this is so, they wander out into the street in their pajamas.
Soon after taking office, Lindbergh signs non-aggression treaties with Germany and Japan. People who object to this, especially Jews, are branded as Communists. But their numbers are few: Lindbergh is getting eighty-to-ninety-per-cent approval ratings. Among his admirers are many Jews. The Lindbergh Administration has created an Office of American Absorption, or O.A.A.
Roth’s novels, however, are basically about fathers and sons, and “The Plot” is no exception. The father in this book is one of Roth’s famous yakkers, a kinsman, for example, of the father in “American Pastoral,” who can never stop telling people how to behave, for their own good, and thus driving them insane. Herman Roth does the same: nightly he blankets his family in “the lecturing and the hectoring love” that he bears them. But he is a far more endearing figure.
I don’t think so. One thing to notice is that the story is a fable. Roth was once asked whether, in writing “Portnoy,” he was influenced by the notoriously abrasive Jewish standup comics of the period—Lenny Bruce, for example. He replied that, if anything, “Portnoy” was inspired by the work of a Jewish sit-down comic, Franz Kafka. Kafka, together with Gogol and Swift, also lurks behind many of his other novels, as he has told us.
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