Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of several of Philip Roth’s mid-career novels, is dogged by the notoriety of a book he wrote in 1969, “Carnovsky,” which told of a Jew reacting against his parents’ first-generation respectability by chasing shiksas around town and involving them in uncanonical sex acts. “Carnovsky” is a huge hit, and everyone assumes that it is autobiographical. “Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?” the Con Edison meter reader asks Zuckerman. “You are something else, man.” But the interest in the book is not just prurient. “Carnovsky” is a satire on the Jewish superego, and so it is decried by Jews and denounced by rabbis, on the ground that it will inflame anti-Semitism. A letter addressed only to “The Enemy of the Jews” is sent to the book’s publisher; the mail room knows where to forward it.
Zuckerman tries to answer such charges, then tries to ignore them, then finds himself answering them again. By the time we see him in “The Anatomy Lesson,” he has been fighting the battle over “Carnovsky” for four years, and his work is at a standstill: “The endless public disputation—what a curse!” At the end of “The Anatomy Lesson,” he decides that he will give up writing and become a doctor. My son the doctor: what better atonement could you make to your parents—and, by extension, to all Jewish overseers?
I can think of one better. Imagine that you are Philip Roth, a man bearing a marked resemblance to Zuckerman. Imagine that your book “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published the same year as “Carnovsky,” and treating similar matters, was the cause of a similar public reaction, with people stopping you in the street to tell you sex jokes or call you a pervert, and with public figures denouncing you as a menace to your people. (The distinguished Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem wrote that the Jews, not the author, would pay the price for “Portnoy”: “Woe to us on that day of reckoning!”) And say that, like Zuckerman, you tried to justify yourself, but at the same time dug in your heels, and that for thirty-five years—much longer than Zuckerman’s agon—you went on portraying Jews who showed not only the traditionally prized Jewish traits, such as wit, brains, and moral seriousness, but also the Jewish-joke characteristics: Jews who never stop talking (a character in the 1986 “Counterlife” says that in Israel, even if you’ve done nothing all day, you go to bed exhausted, just from having people yell at you continually); Jews who view the world as divided between Gentiles and Jews (Portnoy’s mother, Sophie, on the Gentiles: “they are another breed of human being entirely! you will be torn asunder!”); Jews who therefore see life as sown with peril, not just from anti-Semites (there are rugs you can trip over, convertibles you can flip over in), and who can’t stop telling you to watch out. In Roth’s novels, this relentless cautioning is usually done by parents. The sons, most of whom are writers, rebel, and produce comic novels about their elders. For this, guilt is heaped upon them. “Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families—everything is grist for your fun-machine,” Zuckerman’s brother says to him. If you were Philip Roth, caught up throughout your career in this quarrel, and you wanted to make peace, what could you do? Write a novel about how the Jewish parents were right all along. Produce a book about an American pogrom.
Roth’s new novel, “The Plot Against America,” opens in 1940, and at first it seems almost a memoir. In much of his writing (not just the Zuckerman series), Roth has used details from his own life—that’s why people think his work is autobiographical—but here he goes further. The book concerns a family called the Roths: father Herman, an insurance agent for Met Life; mother Bess, a housewife; older son Sandy, twelve; younger son Philip, seven. They live in a two-and-half-family house on Summit Avenue in Weequahic, a working-class section of Newark, where the boys attend the Chancellor Avenue School. To the extent of my knowledge, this is, point for point, the family that Roth grew up in—the names, the street, the house, the school, the father’s job. Later in the book, the family’s phone number is given, and I’ll bet that’s real, too. So is the portrayal of the family’s status as Jews. Though the parents suffered anti-Semitism when they were young, the world they now live in is secure. Weequahic is almost entirely Jewish. The parents certainly think of themselves as Jews, but, in their opinion, they are as American as they are Jewish. This was Roth’s situation, too. When he was a child, he told an interviewer, he never felt threatened as a Jew; he didn’t even know that he belonged to a minority. Nonetheless, he said, he was “surrounded from birth with a definition of the Jew . . . as sufferer, the Jew as an object of ridicule, disgust, scorn, contempt, derision, of every heinous form of persecution and brutality.” It was out of the gap between those two experiences—his sense of safety versus the constant warnings that no Jew was safe—that “Portnoy” was born, he claimed. “The Plot Against America” also comes out of that divide, but it looks very different. It is a historical novel, of a fantastic sort. In the book’s first paragraph, heading off all the true-to-life details, comes the statement that these events took place during the Lindbergh Administration.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh, a twenty-five-year-old stunt flier and airmail pilot from Minnesota, made the world’s first non-stop transatlantic solo flight, from New York to Paris, and became an international hero. Five years later, his first child, twenty months old, was kidnapped and murdered, thus making Lindbergh not just a hero but a martyr, a saint. To escape the ensuing publicity, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a best-selling writer, moved to England in 1935. While in Europe, Lindbergh went to Germany to inspect the planes being developed there, and he became friendly with the country’s new leaders. Hitler, he wrote—after the promulgation of the 1935 racial laws—was “a great man.” In 1938, Air Marshal Hermann Göring, “by order of der Führer,” bestowed on him a medal replete with swastikas. In 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States and began giving heavily attended speeches in support of isolationism. The war that had broken out in Europe, he said, was Europe’s problem, not ours. Certain self-interested groups were trying to push us into it—for example, the Jews, whose control over “our press, radio, and motion pictures” was a matter of grave national concern. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.” In other words, Jews, though they might be American citizens, were still “other peoples,” foreigners.
At this moment, Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing to run for a third term as President, a breach of tradition that many people disapproved of. Lindbergh, a Republican, was urged to run against him. In June of 1940, in Philadelphia, came the Republican Convention. This is the moment at which “The Plot Against America” breaks with history. In reality, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, a moderate, and, in November, he was defeated by Roosevelt. In “The Plot,” the Convention is deadlocked until, on the twentieth ballot, the weary electors receive a surprise visit. At three in the morning, Lindbergh flies into Philadelphia, strides into the convention hall with his goggles still on, and is nominated by acclamation. In November, he beats Roosevelt in a landslide.
One of the glories of the book is its counterpoint of large and small, its zooming back and forth, from chapter to chapter, between world events and the reactions to them in the Roth household. On the night of the Republicans’ balloting, Weequahic is loud with radios, as tense Jews sit waiting to find out if a Nazi sympathizer is going to run for President of their country. When, just before dawn, they find out that this is so, they wander out into the street in their pajamas. Philip, the book’s narrator, describes the scene:
Makes sense, right? Why should the sufferings of these people come to an end in the space of one generation, with the crossing of one ocean?
Soon after taking office, Lindbergh signs non-aggression treaties with Germany and Japan. People who object to this, especially Jews, are branded as Communists. But their numbers are few: Lindbergh is getting eighty-to-ninety-per-cent approval ratings. Among his admirers are many Jews. The Lindbergh Administration has created an Office of American Absorption, or O.A.A., which is basically a program for dispersing the Jewish minority into the Gentile majority—in other words, for de-Jewing the Jews (and also for breaking up Jewish voting blocs). A Newark rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf—a deliciously pontifical windbag (compare Judge Wapter, in “The Ghost Writer”)—has been put in charge of the O.A.A. for the state of New Jersey, and, as he sees it, only narrow, paranoid “ghetto Jews” could find fault with this estimable project. The country’s few patrician Jews—the financiers, the board members, who are mostly of German Jewish stock—also regret that so many of their co-religionists fail to see the light. Why don’t these people move into regular neighborhoods and stop acting so Jewy? Then they, too, could go to Harvard and become investment bankers.
In the unkindest cut, Sandy, Philip’s adored big brother, defects. As part of an O.A.A. program, he is sent for a summer to a tobacco farm in Kentucky. He comes back full of pork chops and condescension for his parents. Then, in 1942, the O.A.A. institutes a program called Homestead 42, whereby the government will move Jewish employees of certain, specially chosen corporations out of their smelly urban enclaves and into wholesome Southern and Midwestern communities where those companies have branch offices. Met Life is one of the participating corporations, and Herman Roth gets a letter congratulating him and his family on being selected for relocation. He says no, and this man who, having left school at the age of twelve, was proud of what he achieved as an insurance agent—proud of his suit and his tie and his car—quits his job at Met Life and goes to work hauling tomatoes for his brother Monty, a produce wholesaler. Other Jews are leaving the country on their own, emigrating to Canada. All of this will sound familiar to anyone conversant with the history of the European Jews in the thirties. And, as in Hitler’s Europe, one thing leads to another. Soon store windows are broken. Jews start to die.
Many people are going to see this story as a recanting. Did Sophie Portnoy and her husband, Jack, live their lives “in continual anticipation of total catastrophe”? Well, Q.E.D. In an eerie conversion, “The Plot Against America” transforms the piety-spouting, finger-shaking elders of the Roth oeuvre into prophets. Bess Roth is like Sophie—worried, protective—but she is no longer banging on the bathroom door, demanding to inspect your bowel movement. She is doing what needs to be done: hanging out the wash, making the sandwiches, going to work in a department store to save up money for a move to Canada. She is the most admirable woman Roth has ever created (that is a slow track, but never mind), and she is utterly alive and convincing.
Roth’s novels, however, are basically about fathers and sons, and “The Plot” is no exception. The father in this book is one of Roth’s famous yakkers, a kinsman, for example, of the father in “American Pastoral,” who can never stop telling people how to behave, for their own good, and thus driving them insane. (At the end of that book, a woman to whom he is orating on the perils of alcoholism tries to stick a fork in his eye, and you sympathize with her.) Herman Roth does the same: nightly he blankets his family in “the lecturing and the hectoring love” that he bears them. But he is a far more endearing figure. Roth once told an interviewer that when he was a child his father suffered a severe financial setback, and that the courage he showed in fighting his way back from that made him seem to his son a cross “between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman.” In “The Plot,” the father also suffers a reverse, when he has to go to work for Uncle Monty. This involves a sixteen-hour workday, at a huge pay cut. He shoulders it like a champion. He is good, he is responsible, he is uncertain. Chapter after chapter, he fears that he is making mistakes, doing the wrong thing. He is strong—big-shouldered, big-chested—but his ears stick out and he talks like an innocent. (Seeing the Lincoln Memorial for the first time, he says, “And they shot him, the dirty dogs.”) He is The Parent: serious, virtuous, limited, oppressive, poignant. And every decision that he makes in the course of the book turns out to be correct.
Other books by Roth, when they err, usually do so by an excess of provocation, a refusal to get up off the whoopee cushion. “The Plot,” when it goes astray, does so in the opposite direction—sentimentality, rhetoric—and this is often in relation to the father. The endless parental haranguing? This, Roth now says, was part of the energy that enabled Jewish slum boys to fight their way out of poverty: “Ardor, for these men, was all they had to go on. What their Gentile betters called pushiness was generally just this—the ardor that was everything.” Here, in two sentences, we see something like what Tolstoy, in “Anna Karenina” ’s famous harvesting scene, did for Levin: too much—the language is incantatory, pushy, even—and also just enough, enough to bang us on the head and say, “I really mean this.”
But what does Roth really mean? Is he sorry that he said all those naughty things about the Jews? Sophie Portnoy, Judge Wapter—these immortals—does he want us to forget about them? “American Pastoral” (1997), with its admirable, duty-doing Jewish hero, was seen by some as a making of amends. So was the 1993 “Operation Shylock,” in which the protagonist—called Philip Roth—actually goes on a spy mission for the Israeli intelligence service. In “The Counterlife,” we are introduced to a leader of a West Bank settlement with many warnings that he is a dangerous fanatic; then the man turns out, disturbingly, to produce a vivid, cogent argument (including a warning that there will be pogroms in America). Is Roth, now seventy-one, going down a penitential road, and is “The Plot” his newest way station?
I don’t think so. One thing to notice is that the story is a fable. Roth was once asked whether, in writing “Portnoy,” he was influenced by the notoriously abrasive Jewish standup comics of the period—Lenny Bruce, for example. He replied that, if anything, “Portnoy” was inspired by the work of a Jewish sit-down comic, Franz Kafka. Kafka, together with Gogol and Swift, also lurks behind many of his other novels, as he has told us. Clearly, what Roth admires in these writers—or what he has emulated—is their ability to couch the most extravagant, grotesque fantasy in an utterly mundane realism, so that the reader cannot say, “No, this could not happen.” The other superb achievement of those writers is to combine horror with comedy. They make you laugh; they suck you in. Their writings are satires of the highest kind, and that’s what “The Plot” is, too. It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as it goes along. (Walter Winchell runs for President; Philip’s mother tells him he can’t go to school tomorrow, because we might be declaring war on Canada.) In the end, the book may not even be about the Jews. To find the actions of one’s government both comical and mortally frightening is an experience that Gentiles can share, especially at the present moment, which may have figured as heavily as the Second World War in the genesis of Roth’s tale.
Something else that prevents us from seeing “The Plot” as a straightforward political statement is its “multivocality.” Many voices speak, in opposition to each other, and almost all of them (not Rabbi Bengelsdorf) sound persuasive. This is an old gambit of Roth’s, and the one that probably annoys his detractors most; they can’t figure out whose side he’s on. It is also the one quality—or one of four or five (the satiric gift, the voice, the ear, the exploration of American history)—that has made him great. In “The Plot Against America,” the multivocality is achieved, for the most part, by having a political catastrophe, debated by many people in solemn moral terms, be narrated through the eyes of a child, who lacks morality, who wants only his mother and his stamp collection, and who has no fine phrases to cover his self-seeking. When his cousin Alvin, disgusted by Lindbergh’s isolationism, goes off to the European front with the Canadian Army and returns with one of his legs blown off, this is piteous, and also it’s not, because we hear from Philip—who must share his bedroom with his wounded cousin—about how horrified and grossed out he is by Alvin’s stump (it has scabs), by his prosthesis (it has straps and clamps), by his missing leg (it will come and chase Philip in the night).
The book’s foremost sufferer, though, is not Alvin but a little boy named Seldon Wishnow, who lives downstairs from the Roths. Seldon throws a ball like a girl; all he likes to do is play chess. Philip’s goal is to be a regular guy, and he wants no part of this loser. Seldon, meanwhile, worships Philip and lies in wait, each morning, to walk to school with him. In the middle of the book, Seldon’s father dies. He has cancer, and finally he can’t stand it anymore and kills himself. This is very sad, except in Philip’s account of it. Mr. Wishnow, he enthusiastically tells us, strangled himself with the family’s curtain cords, in the hall closet: “When Seldon, home from school, went to put his coat away, he found his father, in his pajamas, hanging face-down on the closet floor amid the . . . galoshes.” Seldon’s fatherlessness makes him more pathetic, of course, except in Philip’s eyes. Everywhere he turns, there is that pasty face, that imploring voice. Finally, Philip hatches a plan. His Aunt Evelyn is Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s assistant, which means that she has control over Homestead 42 assignments. Philip goes to her and recommends the Wishnows as candidates for that program. Seldon and his widowed mother are thus relocated to Kentucky. Goodbye, Seldon!
But then the pogroms begin, in Kentucky, among other places, and one night the Roth family gets a call from Seldon, who says that it’s 10 p.m. and his mother hasn’t come home: “She’s dead, Mrs. Roth! Just like my father! Now both my parents are dead!” Furthermore, he hasn’t had his dinner. The conversation that ensues is one of the finest scenes in the book. To calm Seldon down, Mrs. Roth wants him to eat something. Seldon can find no dinner food in the house, but he manages to locate some Rice Krispies, and Mrs. Roth tells him to make himself a meal of that, a proper meal:
Encapsulated in this exchange is just about every important element in the book: its moral beauty (the good, efficient, rescuing mother), its horror (Seldon is right, his mother has been killed, and though we already know this, Mrs. Roth and Seldon don’t), its comedy (“Can I talk to Philip?”). In the end, the tireless Herman Roth drives to Kentucky and fetches the child, with the result that Philip, who had thought to remove Seldon from his neighborhood, instead finds him installed in his home, in the bed next to his, now vacated by Alvin. Mercifully, we are given no details about Seldon’s grief. All Philip says is: “There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.” Good—he learns to be decent. (The book is a bildungsroman as well as a satire.) But, in front of us, at least—those two sentences are the last in the book—he never learns enough to hide what is less decent. He is therefore the ideal narrator for this sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness (new in Roth), its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle. ♦
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