One bite and you'll be hooked "One of our region's better little dining secrets." — Danny Raskin *** Detroit Free Press Live Entertainment Thursday – Saturday A Sampling of Our New Menu Items... 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. — LAKE SUPERIOR WHITEFISH Flash fried in Japanese bread crumbs with lemon butter sauce. $13.95 CEDAR PLANK SALMON Oven baked on a cedar plank and served with tarragon sauce. $15.95 r 15% off Total Bill Lunch or Dinner (excluding tax, tip and alcoholic beverages) Expires on 11/21/04 L 39455 West Ten Mile Road in Novi • Southwest corner of Ten Mile & Haggerty Phone: 248.478.9742 www.moesonten.com 895100 Visit our 2nd Livonia location at: 37273 W. Six Mile Rd. (in Newburgh Plaza) (734) 464-5934 FEATURING AUTHENTIC CHINESE/ASIAN COOKING, SUSHI BAR & DIM SUM Not good with any other offer t coupon per table • with coupon Expires 10131:04 Lei Ting 525 N. Main St., Ste 150 Milford (just N. of Commerce in the Valley Plaza) Szechuan Empire Restaurant 29215 Five Mile Rd. Livonia Szechuan Empire North 39450 14 Mile Rd. 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