Books
Election night was, amongst other things, an opportunity to get spectacularly drunk. JCRs were kept open all over the university as a predominantly liberal, secular student body watched, with mounting doom, the circus that characterised the re-election of George W. Bush. To many it was scary and surreal, yet not completely unpleasant. Human beings have always enjoyed imagining their own annihilation: now we could watch it unfold from the comfort of our own JCRs.
Philip Roth's new novel, his 26th, appeals to the latent doom eagerness within us all. What would have happened, Roth speculates over the 360 pages of The Plot Against America, if the US aviator, national hero and Nazi-sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh, had gained the Republican nomination and beaten Roosevelt in the 1940 election? The answer, masterfully unfolded in gorgeous, supple prose, is by turns compelling, terrifying and - although not to the extent of some of his previous novels - hilarious.
Of course, I am not arguing that Roth is simply cashing in on cheap, apocalyptic thrills. As in the mesmerically brilliant trilogy of American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), he is exploring the interrelation of history and personal experience, the way in which history 'harasses our private lives', as Auden puts it. At the heart of the novel is Roth's actual family, as they were (or rather, would have been) in the early 1940s: Jewish, lower middle-class, and understandably appalled and terrified by Lindbergh's rise to power. It is nothing new for Roth to write about 'himself'; but the inclusion of fictional versions of his mother, father and older brother, Sandy, give the book a richly paradoxical nature: Roth has made this his most overtly political novel - and his most personal one.
Throughout, very large and very small things are juxtaposed, then shown to bleed into one another, as when the children in Roth's neighbourhood begin playing a game called 'I Declare War', or when the young narrator's treasured stamp collection appears in a dream bearing Nazi insignia.
At the same time we are shown the impersonal forces of history moulding the inner selves of the novel's main characters, we are also, of course, being given the triumphant reversal of this process: Lindbergh and the bigoted rabble who support him are ultimately only puppets at the mercy of Roth's aesthetic mastery. Power lies not with aggressive prejudice but with the shaping mind. Like all great writers, indeed like all bad writers, like all men everywhere, it is Roth's fate (and ours) to live in troubled times. But 'reality' is a subjective affair, and there are ways of conquering the nightmare of history that do not involve merely turning away from it; imaginative confrontation is one of them.
Roth's effort in this respect is a highly successful one. The potency of the detail he creates is astounding. It perhaps now seems obvious that books will forever more be loaded with the significance of the recent US election, but he is still coming to terms with a quite different election over 50 years ago. Nevertheless The Plot against America has a very real impact upon today's reader. The novel is not a hopeful one, yet the fact of it's having been written is at least one reason not to despair completely; it's success may still hold much significance.
18th Nov 2004