So I do not get very excited about books all that often, but I am very excited to read Philip Roth's new novel, "The Plot Against America," which has been getting just amazing reviews.
The book is essentially a 'what if' book -- what if Franklin Roosevelt had lost the 1940 election to Charles Lindbergh, who then seeks to make peace with Germany and Japan.
The book seeks make references to the world we live in today.
The very long NYT review this weekend said:
"Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel, though in a style his readers might never have predicted — a fable of an alternative universe, in which America has gone fascist and ordinary life has been flattened under a steamroller of national politics and mass hatreds. Hitler's allies rule the White House. Anti-Semitic mobs roam the streets. The lower-middle-class Jews of Weequahic, in Newark, N.J., cower in a second-floor apartment ... The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible. ..."The sad-voiced scholarly narrator recounts the childhood memories of a boy called 'Phil Roth' ... Not once in any of this does Roth glance at events of the present day, not even with a sly wink. ... Roth has found his way to an archetypal nightmare — the anxious, ancestral, midnight fear of the American Jews."
The Washington Post's review over the weekend said:
Certainly it is understandable that some people will refuse to read The Plot Against America because its depiction of Lindbergh offends them, but the loss will be theirs. This is not a novel about Lindbergh (or Roosevelt, or Henry Ford, or Fiorello LaGuardia, or any of the other historical figures who appear in its pages) but a novel about America: the complex and often contentious mix of people who inhabit it, its sustaining strengths and its persistent vulnerabilities, its susceptibility to demagoguery and anti-democratic impulses. It is also a novel about living amid the turmoil and unpredictability of history, about people's powerlessness "to stop the unforeseen," or, as its narrator says: "Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."
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