The Plot Against America

Author: Philip Roth

Philip Roth is one of the two or three leading American novelists from the second half of the twentieth century, whose work consistently explored the Jewish experience in modern America. But he had never produced anything even approaching science fiction before, late in his career, he produced this stunning alternate history. Like much of his work, it incorporates his own family's history, but in this case he imagines the election of anti-semite Charles Lindbergh as President (a real possibility), and an America that therefore comes closer to Hitler's Germany than Churchill's England. Gradually, anti-Jewish laws are passed and the lives of Roth and his family become ever more curtailed. In one brilliant chapter, perhaps the best you'll find in any alternate history novel, he demonstrates how the broad political changes we have witnessed in the background have a profound and immediate personal effect on the young Philip Roth and his brother (though in fairness it should be said that this is followed by one of the most cack-handed chapters you will find in an alternate history novel). Alternate histories tend to be rather distanced affairs, interested in the intellectual puzzle of how the changes would play out, but Roth puts a human face on those changes and counts their personal cost. This is a profound and deeply moving novel.