Great pseudo-autobiographical 'what-if' story except the quicky ending. It's a shame because otherwise it's an excellent reading. ( )

This alternative history, based on the premise that anti-semitic Charles Lindbergh was elected president, was an excellent listen. The alternative Philip Roth clearly describes his childhood obsessions and confusions: how he became absorbed in his stamp collection and other hobbies, how he was torn between his different heroes and allies, how he came to make sense of the people around him, and how his world was upturned by the questionable changes taking place around him.

As many have noted, the ending is a bit of a deus ex machina that does not flow terribly naturally from the events that have been taking place. Similarly, the ending does not serve as a plausible explanation for the changes in civil liberties in the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, for which I believe Roth intends his story to serve as a parable. However, the at should not be allowed to detract from the precision of the first 9 to 10 CD's.

Ron Silver is an excellent reader overall, although perhaps more "New York" sounding than Roth intended. Or perhaps it is just that my midwestern ears cannot easily distinguish the differences. ( )

Once again, Philip Roth explores an intriguing premise: what if isolationist and rumoured anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh had beaten Roosevelt in the 1940 US presidential election? He speculates with powerful insight about an America which is slowly, subtly becoming more hostile towards its Jewish citizens. What a pity Roth's formidable skills seem to desert him in the last chapter, which may as well have been, "And then I woke up, and it was all OK after all. What a nutty dream that was!"

Having Roth's nine-year-old fictionalised "self" as a narrator is a mixed blessing. He gives his younger self far too much credit in terms of his understanding of current events, the political climate and adult relationships (young Philip's conflicted feelings about his neighbour Seldon are much more believable). On the plus side, the narrator's youth means that The Plot Against America is less phallocentric than much of Roth's work, with just one masturbation scene, one description of an erect penis and virtually none of his usual sex/gender role guff. ( )

Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel American Pastoral didn’t really do it for me. I felt that the novel got bogged down a whole lot in rabbit trails that stole the focus from the life of the Lvovs. I didn’t think I’d like Roth after this but thankfully, with The Plot Against America, Roth has, in my eyes at least, shown me the genius that I suspected was lying hidden.

This is a great novel. Why so? Well, for a start, it takes a plausible tweak with history as its starting point and then shows what that would have looked like from the viewpoint of a lower-middle class Jewish family in a Jewish neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey.

The tweak is Lindbergh, not Roosevelt, winning the 1940 US election. The family is Roth’s own.

This combination of the vivid reality of his own Jewish childhood and the fantasy of a pro-Nazi US administration works extremely well as a backdrop for Roth’s exploration of issues of governance, racism and what it meant to grow up Jewish in a ‘free’ nation at the penumbra of the Nazi shadow.

I felt that the novel was at its strongest when Roth focussed on portraying events through his quasi-fictitious self. This wonderful device enables him at once to capture both the micro level

" …the new boy downstairs wasn’t going to be any more of a picnic than the one before him had been, and this was when I determined to run away again. I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself."

and the macro

" Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it – generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to – while my father, of course, was only a Jew."

Occasionally, the novel wanders off into sociopolitical areas that Roth was to bring to maturity with American Pastoral. Thankfully, these are few and far between here and the vivid childhood perspective usually dominates to bring to the fore the fears and unkowns of those dark days of the world. ( )

http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=88 ( )