For Roth, it’s a plot to look at the ‘big stuff’

Philip Roth has always been something of a provocateur, writing books that operate like word bombs, disrupting the assumptions of the status quo. This is particularly true of his frank (some would say self-hating) presentation of American Jewry in such works as “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” with its story “The Conversion of the Jews.”

In the wake of that latter effort -- in which a 13-year-old boy threatens to jump off a synagogue unless its members admit they believe in Jesus Christ -- Roth was vilified by many Jewish readers. During a 1962 talk at New York’s Yeshiva University, he was even asked: “Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?”

In a certain sense, Roth’s new novel, “The Plot Against America” (in stores next week), offers a response to that question, albeit at a distance of 42 years. Here, after all, Roth imagines not Nazi Germany, but Nazi America -- an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and immediately enters into nonaggression pacts with Germany and Japan.

For Roth, the story had an almost accidental origin. “In January 2001,” he explains by telephone from his home in Connecticut, “I was reading the bound galleys of Arthur Schlesinger’s autobiography, and when I got to the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote in passing that there were people in the Republican Party who wanted to nominate Lindbergh for president. I read that line and it stunned me, because I thought: ‘What if they had?’ ”

Such a “what if” has a profound historical resonance, for Lindbergh was, at best, an anti-Interventionist who viewed war with Germany as against American interests. At worst, he was, in the words of Roosevelt Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler,” an anti-Semite who, in a 1941 speech in Des Moines, accused American Jews of using “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government” to press the U.S. into a European war.

The power of family

For the Jews in the novel, this translates into an atmosphere of fear and paranoia as, little by little, their citizenship is circumscribed. Making things more immediate is Roth’s decision to focus the narrative on his real family: his father Herman; his mother Bess; his older brother Sandy; and his own boyhood self.

“I wanted it to affect a family,” he says, “but it seemed to me that if I began to invent other people, I’d get all muddled up. So I told myself the simplest thing to do -- and perhaps the best thing to do -- was to change just one thing: that is, the result of the 1940 election. Have Lindbergh run and win. But leave everything else in place.”

Roth, of course, has long blurred the line between reality and invention in his fiction. His 1993 novel “Operation Shylock” -- subtitled “A Confession” -- involves a writer named Philip Roth who discovers someone impersonating him, while his Zuckerman books (“The Ghost Writer,” “Zuckerman Unbound,” “The Anatomy Lesson” and “The Prague Orgy”) explore the author’s life through the filter of his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who reappears throughout Roth’s work as a kind of counterpoint.

Like such efforts, “The Plot Against America” is neither autobiography nor history, but a riff, an extrapolation, a reinterpretation of the world.

“Lindbergh was not a fellow traveler,” says A. Scott Berg, whose 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Lindbergh” Roth used as a source. “Nor was he necessarily a Republican or a conservative. He was a real independent voter. He voted twice for Adlai Stevenson.” As for the anti-Semitism question, Berg sees it as somewhat more nuanced, noting that Lindbergh had Jewish friends and even helped one man, a doctor, escape from Nazi Germany, although, in the end, “he did think about and treat Jews differently than everyone else.”

For Roth, though, these issues are less than central, since what interests him is not Lindbergh so much as the effect his fictional administration has on the novel’s characters. “Henry James,” he notes, “said: ‘Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize.’ You’ve got to find a means of dramatizing the large concern you have but if you’re a novelist, you can only do it through human relations.

“That’s why I thought, let’s keep my family there because I don’t want this thing to be didactic. So if my mother has to get a job to send money to Canada, there’s a reality. Or my father having to quit his job. Or my brother discovering America. The closer I can keep to the way people live and the further I can keep from the danger of writing an abstract political text of some kind, the better off I am.”

Roth calls such a process “bringing history into the house,” and it has motivated much of his writing since his 1986 novel “The Counterlife.” In that book, he began to look more fundamentally beyond himself, to connect the intricacies of the inner and the outer worlds.

“I think there was a conscious shift,” he recalls, “when I wrote ‘The Counterlife.’ It’s full of politics and history, particularly in Israel. In writing that book, I felt a great release and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is the way to do it. Grab hold of this big stuff, you know? But keep it small.’ ”

To be fair, even at his most inward turning, Roth has always kept an eye, however loosely, on cultural mythologies. In “The Great American Novel,” he develops a fictional baseball league as an extended metaphor for our collective innocence and corruption, while “Our Gang,” published in 1971 at the height of the Nixon administration, offers up a vicious satire of presidential mendacity.

Still, it wasn’t until the publication of “American Pastoral” in 1997 -- followed by “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain,” the subsequent volumes of his “American Trilogy” -- that Roth truly gave himself over to this sensibility, using it to frame the postwar history of the nation through the lives of several representative families.

“Part of it,” he suggests, “is a function of age. When you’re a young man, if you’re looking back, you’re looking back to your childhood. Otherwise, you want to write about what’s going on around you. But at a certain age, I was able to look back at decades and see that I had lived through what’s called American history.

“ ‘American Pastoral’ came out of notes I’d made some 15, maybe 20, years earlier at the end of the Vietnam War for a book about a family whose daughter blows something up. Then, I began to think back over the most vivid events of my lifetime. So I used the McCarthy era, and 1998, which I found a very strong year, during the impeachment.”

‘It ain’t allegory’

Appearing as it does in the midst of another tense political season, “The Plot Against America” can’t help but read, in part, as a kind of parable, a comment on the present as much as a reinvention of the past. To be sure, there are some striking parallels between the United States the book describes and the one in which we presently find ourselves, not least the image of a Republican president traveling the country in a flight suit, making speeches that seek to reassure the public about large issues in the most generalized terms.

For all this, though, Roth insists that such a reading is too simplistic, and not germane to his intentions for the work. “It ain’t allegory,” he says flatly when asked about it. “I had no intention of pointing to the present moment. When I began working on the novel, Bush had just become president. I wasn’t happy that he was president but nothing had happened. In fact, for the first six months, or whatever they were, there were just a lot of corporate payoffs going on. It looked like it was going to be like the Ford administration. So, no, I was truly fascinated by the problem that faced me, which was to try to re-create 1940 to 1942 as if Lindbergh was president. That was hard enough, let alone making it allegorical.”

If, on the surface, such comments seem a little disingenuous, the contents of the novel bears them out. Certainly, Lindbergh’s United States is a scary place, but it’s scary in a quintessentially American way. There are no cattle cars, no concentration camps, just social programs to help Jews “assimilate.”

It is a kinder, gentler fascist state in which the World Series is still heard on the radio and “guarantees embedded in the U.S. Constitution, combined with long-standing American democratic traditions, made it impossible for a final solution to the Jewish problem to be executed ... as rapidly or efficiently as on a continent where there was a thousand-year history of anti-Semitism deeply rooted in the common people and where Nazi rule was absolute,” Roth writes.

In that regard, “The Plot Against America” brings us back to the question Roth was asked so long ago at Yeshiva University, a question that, the novel implies, is moot.

“Let me say,” Roth declares, “and say in all seriousness, that this didn’t happen. That is, when it might have happened, it didn’t happen. Which tells you something about America. Quite a bit, really. Because in the 1930s, fascism was an international phenomenon. Anti-Semitism was a worldwide phenomenon. In this country, it was at its worst ever. Father [Charles] Coughlin was on the radio, there was Henry Ford, there was Lindbergh, and these people were worshipped.

“The Bund was around,” he continues, “and Fritz Kuhn, its leader, was a monster. Also, Jews were excluded from many, many places and many, many positions, and it went without saying that this was accepted. So there was discrimination on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. And it didn’t happen because we got Roosevelt. The Jews had great faith in Roosevelt. And then came the war and that took care of anti-Semitism. And that obtained for many years.”