Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"The Plot Against America" is a remarkable and unexpected change for Philip Roth in two ways. The first difference is getting all the attention from the critics: he has written a political potboiler in an entirely different genre, a fable that recalls Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," Octavia Butler's "Kindred," and (of course) Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here." But, second, this latest work is his most accessible and thickly plotted novel to date, and--in spite of the forceful political theme--it is also perhaps his mellowest work of fiction. Although the prose is identifiably Roth's, the narrative is a real page-turner merged with a loving family portrait. Thanks to the media hoopla, the novel's storyline is already well-known: the book posits a United States where, in 1940, Charles Lindbergh becomes president. Roth scores a subtle political and historical point here: the reader soon realizes that President Lindbergh himself never expresses overtly anti-Semitic remarks or actions. Instead, the true threats to American democracy are the men Lindbergh chooses for his bipartisan government, including Democrat Burton Wheeler (as Vice President) and the virulently anti-Semitic Henry Ford (as Secretary of the Interior). Furthermore, remaining true to a policy of "American First" isolation (a view Lindbergh steadfastly supported in real life), the new administration negotiates a nonaggression pact with the German Nazi government, develops faith-based programs to "integrate" Jewish residents into American society (with the ostensibly secondary goal of separating them from each other), and maintains an aura of serenity and acquiescence in the face of a rising tide of domestic anti-Semitism. (The volume includes a 30-page appendix with true-life biographical summaries of the historical figures, as well as the complete text of Lindbergh's infamous 1941 speech accusing the British and Jews of conspiring to lead the United States into war.) Yet that's only half the story. Roth's cautionary tale swings between the "alternate history" of the United States and the domestic drama of his own family. Told from the point of view of a seven-year-old Philip Roth, the novel is a riveting yet loving portrait of an average American family who fight and bicker about the most mundane matters in spite of the gathering storm. The most immediate concerns, from the perspective of the young narrator, are the condition of his beloved stamp collection, the hovering presence of the nerdy kid living in the apartment downstairs, the ghosts in the cellar, the grotesqueness of his good-for-nothing cousin's amputated leg, and (above all) the division among members of his household that result when his older brother, his aunt, and a local rabbi passionately support the goals of Lindbergh administration. Although Roth's trademark wit and humor are always present (and there are some superbly hilarious one-liners and slapstick episodes), many of the elements one usually associates with his novels--graphic sex, profane language, belligerent characters, and odious behavior--are entirely subdued or missing. You won't find a protagonist like Mickey Sabbath in "The Plot Against America." Instead, the book's true heroes in the midst of this upheaval are Philip's parents, who struggle to save their extended family from their own despair and from outside danger. And the most poignant and memorable passage in the novel is when young Philip's idea of his mother undergoes a "startling change": that she is "a fellow creature," and he is "shocked by the revelation, and too young to comprehend that there was the strongest attachment of all."