Bridgman reviewed The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Review of 'The Plot Against America' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
There are nearly 7.7 billion people in the world and of them just about 14.5 million are Jewish, a number lower than before the Holocaust. Despite making up less than 0.2 percent of the world, Jews have had an enormous impact on the sciences, academia, and the arts. I'm not Jewish and even though I live in a part of the U.S. with a fairly high Jewish population I don't know a large number of Jews. Nonetheless, many of my favorite writers are Jewish (Isaac Asimov, Saul Bellow, Harold Brodkey, E.L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Christopher Hitchens, Erica Jong, Jerzy Kosinski, Fran Lebowitz, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, J.D. Salinger, James Salter, Susan Sontag) and when they write about Jewish concerns I'm as engaged as if they were writing about me or people in my neighborhood, Jewish or not.
Philip Roth (1933–2018) has always been at the top of my list of …
There are nearly 7.7 billion people in the world and of them just about 14.5 million are Jewish, a number lower than before the Holocaust. Despite making up less than 0.2 percent of the world, Jews have had an enormous impact on the sciences, academia, and the arts. I'm not Jewish and even though I live in a part of the U.S. with a fairly high Jewish population I don't know a large number of Jews. Nonetheless, many of my favorite writers are Jewish (Isaac Asimov, Saul Bellow, Harold Brodkey, E.L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Christopher Hitchens, Erica Jong, Jerzy Kosinski, Fran Lebowitz, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, J.D. Salinger, James Salter, Susan Sontag) and when they write about Jewish concerns I'm as engaged as if they were writing about me or people in my neighborhood, Jewish or not.
Philip Roth (1933–2018) has always been at the top of my list of writers. I read Pornoy's Complaint in eighth grade, which is a great age to read that, and howled with laughter at the appropriate parts. The Plot Against America takes place with similar characters and in the same place—a middle class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey—but is not a comedy. The 2004 novel takes place in the late 30s and early 40s and is a what-if novel: What if Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot, ran against Roosevelt in 1940 (he didn't) and won the presidency?
The Plot Against America might remind you of a novel by another Philip: Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, but it's very different. No sci-fi.
Roth wrote beautifully, as in this passage in which he remembers his thoughts as a child secure in his Newark neighborhood who might be forced to relocate:
Since about three it had been squalling steadily, but abruptly the wind-driven downpour stopped and the sun came blazing out as though the clocks had been turned ahead and, over in the west, tomorrow morning was now set to begin at six p.m. today. How could a street as modest as ours induce such rapture just because it glittered with rain? How could the sidewalk's impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from the flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I'd been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.
Nothing would ever get me to leave here.
Not that this is why you should read this book but: When you read it, you'll be surprised by how familiar it sounds.
