Finished this book yesterday. It started quickly but became a bit of a slog. This was surprising since I’ve read more of Philip Roth’s books than any other single author over the last few years and usually finish them quickly. The comparisons of the fictional tale to the current Trump campaign are a bit eerie. The New York Times review described the book as “a terrific political novel” as well as “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.
A plot summary from wiki:
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee and his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated.
Sections I highlighted while reading:
Israel didn’t yet exist, six million European Jews hadn’t yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British mandate since the 1918 dissolution by the victorious Allies of the last far-flung provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire) was a mystery to me.
For nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood as he was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the tiny monoplane of the Spirit of St Louis even happened to coincide with the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered herself to be pregnant with my older brother.
the boldness of the world’s first transatlantic solo pilot had been permeated into the pathos that transformed him into a martyred titan comparable to Lincoln.
“No person of honesty and vision”, Lindbergh said, “can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them.” And then, with remarkable candor, he added:
A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not…We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.
Fiorello La Guardia was the 99th mayor of New York (1934-45) and stood 5’2″ tall.
“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything – it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”
prodigious pedant that he was
“Did you know, Sandy, that tobacco was the economic foundation of the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown in Virginia?”
And when you remember that the First Families of Virginia were the forebears of the Virginia statesmen who were our country’s Founding Fathers, you appreciate tobacco’s vital importance to the history of our republic.
It was the first time I was my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.
“on the day when a candidate for the presidency of the United States requires a phalanx of armed police officers and National Guardsmen to protect his right to free speech, this great country will have passed over in to fascist barbarism. I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his won. I cannot accept that the abhorrence for my religion shared by Adolf Hitler and Charles A. Lindbergh can already have corroded…”
the uneasy aloofness that was her inbuilt defense against Gentiles.
and then, to throw a scare into the tourists crowding the beach, emerging from the water screaming “Shark! Shark!” while pointing in horror at his stump.
Vocabulary:
virulence: Venomous hostility
pogrom: An organized massacre, typically of Jews
proselytize: Convert as a recruit
ignominious: disgrace, dishonor, public contempt
vilify: defame, slander
bellicose: eager to fight
callow: immature
venerable: commanding respect due to age or dignity
rectitude: principled in conduct
sonorous: deep, resonant
peripatetic: itinerant
goyim: a term used by Jews to refer to somebody not Jewish
mellifluous: sweet, smooth, honeyed
pince-nez: glasses held on by a nose pincher without leg pieces
portentous: ominously significant
probity: integrity, honesty
upbraiding: severe reproaching or finding fault with
repudiate: refuse to accept the truth, deny the truth of
ingrate: ungrateful one
potentate: person with great power, ruler
ignominious: humiliating, discreditable
obsequious: fawning, servilely compliant
despot: autocrat, tyrant
taciturn: inclined to silence, reserved in speech
nefarious: extremely wicked, vicious
evanescent: fleeting, fading away
laconic: concise, of few words
quixotic: impulsive, unpredictable – a la Don Quixote in romance