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scheme to go work at a pretzel factory
that employs deaf-mutes and earn the
money for a one-way ticket to Omaha,
Neb., "where Father Flanagan ran Boys
Town" — his aim, again, is to be "just a
boy and nothing more."
Fear has caused him to internalize the
Just Folks agenda: He wants to efface all
signs of ethnic difference.
As a writer, of course, Philip Roth has
devoted a good deal of his genius to the
task of recording for posterity the partic-
ularities that make
the Weequahic sec-
tion of Newark in
the middle of the
20th century indeli-
bly different (and at
the same time repre-
sentative). In this
novel, his 21st, he
adds some brilliant
touches to that life-
long project.
I meant when." (A fine bit of channel-
ing on Mr. Roth's part.)
The backlash against Homestead 42
triggers a backlash against Winchell (in
September of 1942, 'America history ...
recorded its first large-scale pogrom"),
and from there events spiral out of con-
trol — along with the plot of The Plot
until the country
Against America
plunges into chaos.
What's the point of this counterfactual
fantasy? A daring imaginative exercise,
it's a way to see both the
country and the Roth fam-
ily more clearly by making
everything thrillingly
strange. It's an explicit
rebuke, as well, to those
who still insist, despite
Sinclair Lewis' 1935 warn-
ing, that "it can't happen
here." (Is it also a parable
about the dangers of the
Bush administration's flag-
waiving assault on civil lib-
erties? Though Roth, in an
essay in the New York
Times Book Review, says
not, I think I hear faint
Charles Lindbergh,
echoes.)
above, is elected
There's something
president and
delightfully creepy about
Walter Winchell
picturing Nazi Foreign
is assassinated in
Minister Joachim von
Roth's "counterfac-
Ribbentrop at a White
tual fantasy."
House state dinner, and the
Office of American
Absorption is a brilliant
device for exposing the coer-
My favorite begins with the smell of
cive, implicitly bigoted side of self-right-
Christmas trees on a downtown street.
eous American patriotism, but it's on the
He breathes in the "rustic tang" and
domestic front — back home in meticu- then he's off: "There were no trees for
lously mapped Weequahic — that
sale in our neighborhood — because
Roth's book succeeds best. ("History is
there was no one to buy them — and so
everything that happens everywhere,"
the month of December, if it smelled at
Philip's father tells him. "Even what hap- all, smelled of something a hissing alley
pens in his house to an ordinary man — cat had tugged from an overturned
that'll be history too someday.")
garbage can in somebody's yard, and of
"I wonder," Roth writes in the second
supper heating on the stove of a flat
sentence of the novel, "if I would have
whose steamy kitchen window was open
been a less frightened boy if Lindber
a crack to let in air from the alleyway,
hadn't been president or if I hadn't been
and of the bursts of noxious coal gas
the offspring of Jews." Most of The Plot
spewed from the furnace chimneys, and
Against America is about the dire conse-
of the pail of ashes dragged up from the
quences of Lindbergh's presidency, but
cellar to be emptied outdoors over slip-
there's also a tantalizing undercurrent, a
pery patches of sidewalk." For emphasis,
hidden personal history, again counter-
he turns once more to difference: "I
factual: What if young Philip could have traveled downtown ... and saw the trees
and took a whiff and discovered that, as
sloughed off his Jewishness?
with many things, for Christians,
Twice in the course of the novel,
December was otherwise."
Philip resolves to run away from home,
In this novel about history "turned
and in each instance he plans to assume
wrong way round," it's always the "oth-
a wholly new identity.
erwise" that counts. ❑
First he decides to become an orphan
Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Featurewell.com all rights reserved.
("I wanted to be a boy on the smallest
scale") and tries to gain admittance to a
Adam Begley is the book editor of the
Catholic orphanage; then he hatches a
New York Observer.
—
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