The Plot Against America

Philip Roth

Started: Sept 20 Finished: Oct 22

Review

Notes

p.84:

“Under the auspices of “Just Folks”—described by Lindbergh‘s newly created office of American absorption as “a volunteer work program, introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life“

• Sounds like something in which Kim Reynolds would participate

p.137

• Philip is having to face up to Alvin’s “stump.” And soon Herb (the father’s name? I forget) is going to have to confront the consequences of an interventionist world stance. Will he remain true to his tenets?

“You can see,” he told me, struggling now to suppress disgust with the futility of everything, “how good at doing this you get,” and resumed the rewrapping, which, like the healing, appeared destined to go on in our bedroom forever.

October 8, 2024

P.176:

But under Lindbergh, government efforts at harassing or intimidating Bund members ceased and they were able to regain their strength by identifying themselves not only as American patriots of German extraction opposed to America’s intervention in foreign wars but as staunch enemies of the Soviet Union. The deep fascist fellowship uniting the Bund was now masked by vociferous patriotic declamations on the peril of a worldwide Communist revolution.

10/17/24, 6:09:33 AM

Fox got a 70 on his Geography Test. Yes it’s 2nd grade, but I’m secretly worried.

I’ve missed Roth’s two week deadline within which one should really complete a novel. Or else one hasn’t truly engaged it.

This novel feels like there is another Roth novel buried underneath its detritus.

• “the faintly anglicized diction prized in a network news announcer back in radio’s early days."

• it feels like Roth put more of himself into Sandy than Phil. He gets to be in the background and observe and be observed by the narrator from a distance of years - has his motives and trajectory re-examined under the microscope of the mature novelist’s gaze.

• the scene when Phil and his mom talk to the Wishnows in Kentucky. It hurts to see poor Sheldon stuck out there in the sticks all alone. It’s interesting how the urban/rural dynamic is subverted here: to the Jewish families, rural America represents a trap, and separation — the opposite of the freedom of space and land it classically symbolizes.

  10/19/24, 6:35:25 AM

  “In that era, the common Jewish propensity was by and large nonviolent as well as non alcoholic, a virtue whose shortcoming was the failure to educate the bulk of the young of my generation in the combative aggression that was the first law of other ethnic educations and indisputably of great practical value when you couldn’t negotiate your way out of violence or manage to run away."

• Phil is figuring out that his father is actually a brute force of nature, a hurricane of bundled up rage

The way this scene is built up feels masterly. Describing it all before anything occurs. It’s all by way of a preview. Describing the outcome of a scene left undefined. The Plot against America is to cleave families in half, or by some other fraction more miniscule.

“…fantastical, cross-species creatures sprung from mythology into our living room and pulping each other’s flesh with their massive snaggletoothed horns. Inside a house you usually scale down your movements, you scale down your speed, but here the scale of things was reversed and terrifying to behold."

• this is the spot where Roth allows his true unrestrained self to emerge. Marshaling all his powers.

”It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house—like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree."

• “Trying to be faithful to what he’s trying to get rid of."

”First, a front-page Chicago Tribune article, datelined Berlin, reports that the twelve-year-old son of President and Mrs. Lindbergh –the child believed to have been kidnapped and murdered in New Jersey in 1932–has been reunited with his father at Berchtesgaden after having been rescued by the Nazis from a dungeon in Kraków, Poland, where he had been held prisoner in the city’s Jewish ghetto ever since his disappearance and where, each year, blood was drawn from the captive boy to be used in the ritual preparation of the community’s Passover matzohs.”

Very QAnon.

Phil is considering running away again. Sheldon is the well to which he turns when life gets too chaotic — someone over whom he can exert power. Like how my 5 y/o will refuse to buckle his seatbelt on occasion when life gets too overwhelming.

”Not that I’d identify myself as Jewish once I reached Omaha. I’d say—speaking aloud at long last—that I didn’t know what I was or who. That I was nothing and nobody—just a boy and nothing more, and hardly the person responsible for the death of Mrs. Wishnow and the orphaning of her son. Let my family raise her son as their son from here on out. He could have my bed. He could have my brother. He could have my future. I’d make my life with Father Flanagan in Nebraska, which was even farther from Newark than Kentucky."