{"id":10450,"date":"2007-02-19T14:02:34","date_gmt":"2007-02-19T19:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/02\/19\/10450.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:46","slug":"book-report-the-plot-against-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/02\/19\/book-report-the-plot-against-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Plot Against America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I like Philip Roth. I mean, not personally, although I don’t really know if he’s as big an asshole as he makes himself out to be. But I tell you, he’s funny. As I’ve surely mentioned here, I love The Great American Novel<\/I>, and I liked Goodbye, Columbus<\/I> and The Breast<\/I> and Sabbath’s Theater<\/I> a lot, too. These books are funny, wild and biting. The Plot Against America<\/a> is not.\n

Gentle Readers of these Book Reports know that I am always hocking about what happens when speculative fiction novels come from outside the expected channels, either because they are not marketed as speculative or because they are by writers not associated with the field, or (more usually) both. This looked to be particularly interesting: an alternate history book by a Literary Giant™ dealing with fascism and anti-Semitism in America. Sadly, Mr. Roth’s relentlessly somber book is not actually very interesting. No, I tell a lie. It’s interesting. It’s just not very good. So instead of complaining about why o why wasn’t this book discussed in the community and nominated for all the awards, I complain about the book inexplicably not only winning the Sidewise Award<\/a> for 2004 but evidently being the only nominated novel. What, did you think I would be unable to find something to complain about?\n

Part of that is that Mr. Roth doesn’t (according to popular rumour, easily believed) read alternate history, so he is unfamiliar with the conventions of the sub-genre. When, at the end, we are treated to the Moment when his history branches from the one we know, it is (a) too late, and (2) lame. People who like alternate-history (like myself) generally want to know what that Moment was, and want it to be good. I’m not saying that there is no good alternate history without a good Moment, revealed nice and early, but the lack of same is a pretty big hurdle to get over. There are other things that struck me as clumsy. The ending, which nobody really seems to have liked, which not only reveals the Moment but also brings the divergent timeline back to our own, is rushed and unrewarding. The characters, particularly of the Actual Historical Figures™, are not interesting or stirring. And the prevalence of page-long paragraphs (at one point I counted seven paragraphs comprising five full pages) makes for tough slogging.\n

It does, as it is meant to, give people an awful lot to chew on, and discuss afterward. The problem is that it does so with a book that is clumsy and dull, and not much fun to read. So Your Humble Blogger is stuck saying “Read this, you probably won’t enjoy it, but I want to discuss it with you.” Not so effective. So I’ll try without the book, at least mentioning the two main things that I would want to talk about, if I forced a book club to read the thing. If I were in a book club.\n

First is the way in which Mr. Roth makes a very good and sympathetic apology for the pre-War isolationists. That is, when he presents their arguments, he largely does so effectively, and when he presents their worldview, he largely does so sympathetically. Oh, there are vicious anti-Semites in the book, sure. But when Rabbi Bengelsdorf (one of the few really interesting and memorable characters in the book, unfortunately not brought through to any real conclusion) says that if the US goes to war in Europe, it will mean the death and dismemberment of boys just like Philip, it’s, you know, true. And when Philip’s cousin Alvin runs away to join the Canadian military and fight Hitler, he is not a glorious but a pathetic and nasty fighter, and when he comes back missing a leg, he’s not a noble martyr to the cause but a bitter self-pitying lout. He becomes a small-time criminal and layabout, and generally fails to fit in either with the nice little Jewish community of Newark or with the great big Gentile world.\n

Those two make up the other really interesting thing in the book. When President Lindbergh decides to break up the Jewish neighborhoods by leaning on companies to transfer individual employees to town in the Midwest, it’s viewed, rightly, as an attempt to destroy Jewish character and identity. But that’s Jewish character and identity as something distinct from American-ism. There Jews who feel that the insistence of Jews on living with other Jews in enclaves of Jewish-America is part of the problem of Anti-Semitism. You can only rise so far within the old neighborhood, and rising out of the neighborhood is problematic, both for the fellow who rises and for the neighborhood he leaves behind. This bit seems to me to be addressed at our problem with African-Americans, and the way we’ve fucked up integration in this country, but its argument is very troubling. The integrationist Jews are, after all, dupes of the Anti-Semites. In the end, it’s the neighborhood that provides safety; the Jews who leave are killed or imprisoned. Well, not all of them, but pretty nearly all the ones who are characters we know. And that’s in addition to the comforts of the urban shtetl, the butchers who have kosher meat, the grocer who has the special Passover goods, the neighbors who speak the mama loshen<\/I>. The neighborhood is comforting and restricting, isolating and protecting. If, in part, the neighborhood itself is what makes it unsafe to go outside the neighborhood, that does not protect anybody who leaves.\n

It’s troubling to me. I’m a Jew married to a Christian. I’ve lived, briefly, in areas with substantial Jewish populations and in areas with miniscule Jewish populations. I prefer to be able to buy hamentaschen at the store. Even if I prefer to eat the home-made ones, I prefer to be able<\/I> to buy them at the store. It makes a difference.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like Philip Roth. I mean, not personally, although I don\u2019t really know if he\u2019s as big an asshole as he makes himself out to be. But I tell you, he\u2019s funny. As I\u2019ve surely mentioned here, I love The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17972,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10450\/revisions\/17972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}