The Plot Against America: Philip Roth

New
Paperback
2005
$11.81

`In The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself... America has not read enough of Philip Roth' Bernard-Henri Levy When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invades every Jewish household in America. Not only has Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiates a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, guaranteeing peaceful relations between the two nations. What then follows is the alternative America of this startling counterfactual novel by Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacingly anti-Semitic years of the Lindbergh presidency. Jewish families are shaken violently apart, whilst America is oblivious to its own dark metamorphosis. `Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans - immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump's election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh's' New Yorker

Synopsis

`In The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself... America has not read enough of Philip Roth' Bernard-Henri Levy When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invades every Jewish household in America. Not only has Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiates a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, guaranteeing peaceful relations between the two nations. What then follows is the alternative America of this startling counterfactual novel by Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacingly anti-Semitic years of the Lindbergh presidency. Jewish families are shaken violently apart, whilst America is oblivious to its own dark metamorphosis. `Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans - immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump's election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh's' New Yorker

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Edition: 1
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 06 Oct 2005
ISBN 10: 0099478560
ISBN 13: 9780099478560
Book Overview: 'The Plot Against America is an epic built - painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly - of the small structures of the particular. A dark, human masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers' The Times

Media Reviews

It's one of the great political novels for its depiction of how alterations in power affect ordinary men and women, and how obedience brings disaster. -- Linda Grant * New Statesman *
In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself... America has not read enough of Philip Roth -- Bernard-Henri Levy * New Statesman *
A dark, humane masterpiece, Roth is at the peak of his powers * The Times *
Another frighteningly intense performance * Sunday Telegraph *
The word genius doesn't seem excessive... The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism * Guardian *

Untouchable...he is bequeathing us a body of work that adds up to the most accomplished dissection of American political, social and personal mores

* Observer *

Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive

* Guardian *
Subtle, persuasive and unsettling. A brilliantly troubling and heartening novel * Sunday Times *
Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans - immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump's election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh's * New Yorker *

Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today

* Independent on Sunday *
The novel is full of his usual furious cackling; tragedy tipping into comedy and comedy into tragedy within the space of a few sentences. The prose is beautiful * Mail on Sunday *

A sensation

* Sunday Times *
A polemical classic * Esquire *

Brilliant

* Metro *
One of the best writers of dialogue in the history of inverted commas * The Times *
A reverberating celebration of family, community and humanity * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus - a collection of stories, and a novella - for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth's lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.