The Plot Against America and The Problems With America

This summer I read Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pride and Prejudice was not nearly as tedious a read as I had originally anticipated; however, I was somewhat disappointed with Roth’s The Plot Against America. Having heard good reviews of the acclaimed author and being interested in the ‘what-if’ plot of the novel, I was led to believe that the book would be a riveting account of an “imaginative and utterly—terrifyingly—believable” nightmare scenario. I was, however, to an extent let down.

Roth’s tangential remarks throughout the work made reading the book more of a chore than a truly riveting experience. I was frustrated to find that the author would so readily go off on tangents about orphanages, his friend Earl’s parents, and movie-theater news reels. These miniature stories about the narrator’s life have little, if anything, to do with the plot and they convey neither meaningful ideas nor any thoughts of critical worth. In addition to rants on such random topics, Roth has an incredible propensity to begin a section describing one instance of importance and then to somehow end the section relating a story of some distant relation to the initial topic. Such a style leaves the plot behind and makes the reader wonder where they came from, what happened along the way, and where they are going. Even in his writing that relates to the plot, the author’s prose too frequently takes on the form of a rant with profuse use of long nonessential clauses that create their own void within which the reader becomes lost.

The story that drives The Plot Against America is well crafted and interesting, but the writer’s style shatters the chance that such an intellectually stimulating novel would have at becoming engaging. Tangents, rants, and convoluted streams of thought create a disconnected story that is difficult to follow. Nevertheless, Roth’s nightmare scenario, though not quite what I expected, was brilliant; instead of creating an American Holocaust, he crafted a story of fear and uncertainty which, in day-to-day life, can be the most terrifying reality of all.

Despite a solid core plot, the author’s methods of conveying his ideas are both enlightening and dissatisfying. The Plot Against America can be seen as a study of American-Jewish life, and in such a frame is an edifying read. The author’s narration enables the reader to see and understand the world through the perspective of the Roth family, with its own problems, concerns, and ideals, and certainly changes how one processes the events of the novel. However, even while speaking of America as unquestionably being his family’s home, the author portrays Jewish life in America as somewhat detached from standard Christian America. In the context of 1940s America, such a setting is perfectly understandable, but in modern society one would look to a contemporary study of the American Jew to also at least hint at the possibility of the realization of a less subdivided America. I say this as one who supports the tenants of multiculturalism but who at the same time hates arbitrary divisions and barriers imposed upon society by the improper and invented lines of ethnicity and race. Such classifications are the work of generalization and dehumanization of the individual that inevitably lead to the collectivism of Fascism and Communism. The individual must come first, but in the creation of a detached group is shelved.

Stylistic and ideological concerns aside, the novel creates an image of an anti-Semitic America that sadly was and still is mirrored in modern American society. Faced with an ignorant populace led into utterly disgusting and shameful ethnic violence, at least covertly, by a president of minimal values and abilities, the Roth family embodies the justifiable concerns of an American minority—concerns that still need to be attended to today.