Having said that, the relationship to current US policy has been pointed out by many critics, and this is effectively borne out by the strong narrative voice, of elder “fictionalised” Philip Roth, a thread which pulls together the past and the present: It is simply impossible to forget that Lindbergh’s anti-war, anti-Semitic address was held in 1941 after the US joined the war, or that Lindbergh never ran for president, and that FDR was re-elected. There is plenty of polemic in this story, and the sense of “there but for the sake of…“ is intentionally unsettling, but the use of real names in a real context, along with real historic events, makes it difficult for the reader to fully engage with the story. What follows is an exploration of what could have happened with a Lindbergh president, based on Lindbergh’s publicly positive statements about Hitler, the Service Cross medal presented to Lindbergh by the Nazis, the anti-Semitism expressed in his diaries, and his isolationist, anti-interventionist comments delivered at rallies at speeches.Īs a distopia, the story effectively conveys the possibility that history could easily have been different, at the same time highlighting the delicacy of the structure of our current democracy–one that could change with little warning. The year is 1940, and Lindbergh runs an anti-war campaign for the presidency, and win. Roth takes a “what if” scenario and carefully develops it, using as much historical fact as he could fit, and then fictionalises the rest. Roth’s “real” family is also part of the story, including his artist brother Sandy and his parents, and it is set in a very similar family house in Newark New Jersey which Roth details in his autobiography. Blurring historical fact and fiction, it takes some time to get used to the narrative tone of this novel, which has a seven year old “Philip Roth” as its protagonist, and aviation hero “Charles A Lindbergh” as the key antagonist. The Plot Against America is just a little bit unsettling, though perhaps for reasons other than those intended by Philip Roth.

As a distopia, the story effectively conveys the possibility that history could easily have been different, at the same time highlighting the delicacy of the structure of our current democracy–one that could change with little warning.

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