If you have any interest in Roth’s The Plot against America and you haven’t read the book yet, you might want to skip this entry.
I mentioned I had a couple problems with Roth’s latest novel. The first is relatively minor. The ending was too abrupt, in contrast to the slow buildup of tension that the author had meticulously crafted in the previous few hundred pages. But that might just be a stylistic quibble. I tend to prefer longer denouements in the novels I read.
The second problem is more substantive. Roth postulates an alternate 1940 in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the presidential election. Lindbergh keeps America out of the war until 1942, when he mysteriously disappears and FDR is returned to the White House in an emergency election. After that, history seems to revert to the existing timeline, with the war ending in 1945 and the Allies emerging victorious. To me, this seems like a much too tidy resolution. Once such a drastic departure from established history is imagined, I don’t think it’s accurate or intellectually honest to portray it as some sort of temporal detour that ultimately had no lasting consequences on the course of human affairs. On the contrary, America’s delayed entry into the war might have had tremendous bearing on the final outcome. Great Britain might have succumbed to an invasion or the Germans might have had sufficient time to overrun the Russians on the Eastern Front. The war still might have ended with a defeated Germany, but the shape of that world would not have been identical to our own.
Roth’s original premise is intriguing and his novel is well worth reading, but I wish he would have looked more closely at the ripples of the events he set in motion.
