By John Williams / New York Times News Service
“On the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters.”
Yes, last November. I remember. But the line above is taken from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), a novel in which aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh, after being elected president in 1940 over Franklin D. Roosevelt, keeps the United States out of World War II and not-so-subtly threatens American Jews while cozying up to the Third Reich.
Returning to the novel at this moment, when panic reading is all the rage, offers a perspective different from that of many apocalyptic best sellers, new and old. Contemporary dystopian fiction has been surging in popularity for several years, but the chaotic and confounding state of America in 2017 has sent readers scrambling back to the genre’s canonical texts: 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale. Those books have plenty to say to anyone fearful of our political climate, and where it might be headed. But they are also fantastical, a blend of satire, science fiction and parable, the point of which is to change our view of reality by inflating it to surreality.
The Plot Against America more rightly belongs to the genre of alternative history, but even that shelf is not an easy fit for it.
Books like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (in which the Axis powers prevailed in World War II) and Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (in which the Confederacy won the Civil War) offer intricately and extensively changed bizarro universes.
Roth’s book, by contrast, is a work of deep realism, much of it the thinly veiled autobiographical story of a family in midcentury Newark, New Jersey. The brash counterfactual around which it’s built plays mostly as a bass note, in an otherwise familiar Roth song.
In the novel, Lindbergh unites a fractured Republican Party, and runs for office on an isolationist platform, promising to keep the US out of the war raging in Europe.
He keeps Roosevelt from a third term in a blowout election, carrying 46 states and winning 57 percent of the popular vote. The widespread antiwar sentiment in the country at the time is turned, in Roth’s version, into a winning hand.
But before embarking on further discussion of a novel about America that has a swastika on its cover, perhaps some caveats would be wise.
When Plot was published, Roth wrote an essay in The New York Times Book Review, in which he emphasized that his interest was in revisiting 1940-1942, not in commenting on George W. Bush’s America or any other version of the country. He wrote the book “not so as to illuminate the present through the past, but to illuminate the past through the past”.
After the election of Donald J. Trump, which even to many on the left made the George W. Bush presidency seem deeply traditional, even boring, Roth told The New Yorker in January: “Writers here don’t live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did.” However, much readers might crave it, no novel offers a neat parallel between its pages and the real world. Still, what parallels do exist in Roth’s novel are striking.
As today, when many urge Trump to denounce attacks on synagogues and mosques, observers in The Plot Against America worry about those emboldened by “a provocateur, cynically encouraging American citizens, who needed in no way to feel besieged to cling to their oldest, most crippling anxieties”.
Most striking just 13 years after it was published is Roth’s portrayal of organized opposition, which is limited and only rises in the communities most directly threatened by the new government.
Though there are protests in a dozen cities after the Iceland Understanding (a nonaggression pact signed by Lindbergh and Hitler), and Democrats condemn the president for “dealing with a murderous fascist tyrant as his equal”, widespread dissent does not develop.
The White House becomes “accustomed to nearly universal deification of Lindbergh”, and even late in the book, he is supported by “a record 80 percent to 90 percent of every classification and category of voter, except the Jews.”
Perhaps because he creates a mostly unified electorate, Roth doesn’t write a political solution for the quandary he envisions.
Lindbergh’s reign is resolved (brilliantly or cheaply or a bit of both, depending on your tolerance for clever plot twists) by something I can’t spoil—but it will raise eyebrows, especially of those who have speculated in recent weeks that the Russians might “have something” on Trump.
Roth didn’t have the first weeks of 2017 to draw on when devising a picture of what mass resistance to unprecedented political change in this country would have looked like. One might imagine him heartened.