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So often has Philip Roth played origami with his personal life in fiction that one distrusts what appears to be a simple detail: Philip Roth is actually a very nice man. It is a side of himself he rarely shows in his fiction. Or perhaps this is simply a side we have overlooked. After all, there was love and compassion to spare in his tender 1991 memoir about his father, Patrimony; and only a scrooge could complete his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winner, American Pastoral, without realizing that the man played havoc with our world—and his own—because he cares about it so deeply.
Talking to the 71-year-old novelist about his latest book, The Plot Against America, it's hard not to wonder if a kinder, gentler Roth has been there all along. He carries on less like America's most fearsome literary writer and more like an engaged schoolteacher.
The tone is appropriate since The Plot Against America is the sort of extraordinary history lesson only he could get away with teaching. Set between 1940 and 1942, it imagines an alternate America in which aviator, and anti-Semite, Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt to the White House. "I told myself this when I started this book," Roth says, "make one change. Just change the 1940 election, and then of course, follow out the consequences of it. But keep everything else in place. Therefore, I used my family and me. Now, had I invented a family, I would have wound up inventing a family very much like ours."
What makes the book so mesmerizing is the way this history affects the Roths: Philip, his brother Sandy, mother Bess and father Herman. We follow the fictional Roths through two tumultuous years with nervous apprehension, then outright terror as America veers dramatically off course from written history. In the wake of victory, Lindbergh signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and soon signals of the very worst sort start to appear. Jews are forced to relocate under a creepy program called Just Folks. Mobs roam the streets. Young men flee to Canada, not to escape a war but to fight one.
Roth says he used his own family here to essentially "trick the reader at a certain point in the reading into believing it;" he wanted readers to "forget that this was an invention." It works. We huddle up to the page and listen as Lindbergh preaches hatred, and cheer as Walter Winchell rises to become Lindbergh's biggest critic—then cry out when he is assassinated. Through it all, Herman becomes both a weaker and stronger man and Philip loses his innocence.
The wider world might be surprised to see this tenderness surface so prominently in Roth's work. We thought he was rebelling against the good Jewish boy persona when he painted an ozone trail of sexual hilarity across America's horizon with Portnoy's Complaint. The book sold more than 400,000 copies in 1969 alone and taught millions how to masturbate. His entire career could have been lived in the shadow of "that book" had he not, in the early '90s, published a series of others, hitting every emotional key and winning every major American literary award in the process, some for the second time.
Roth advises against reading the novel as a roman a clef of current times. "I began it back in January of 2001 and Bush had just become president," Roth says. "We didn't even know what he was; 9/11 wouldn't take place for six more months. So I was very much trying to deal with these figures who were out of my childhood, some of whom were quite frightening to me as a child, like Father Coughlin."
Roth remembers Coughlin's Sunday night radio addresses as vividly as he remembers hearing Hitler's voice on the radio. "He either broadcast from his little church outside Detroit, or else occasionally, he'd have a big rally in what was then the Detroit Tigers baseball stadium—and that used to scare me particularly because I knew how many people could be there."
Even as Roth reasserts it was not his intention to write a response to the Bush administration and its policies, he does admit to being "incredibly anxious" about America's political climate. "Of all the political disappointments I've had in my lifetime, this is the worst, this is the worst. Because you can and cannot foresee the consequences here."
Like Jonathan Swift, who didn't publish Gulliver's Travels until he was nearly 60, Roth may be one of those rare writers who will do his most impressive work later in life. It's a startling turnaround from 15 years ago. As if literary production were some kind of athletic contest, Roth has faced down a quadruple bypass, back surgery and a rocky personal life, and has emerged from it all stronger. He still works long hours and lives monkishly near the Housatonic River in Connecticut. It is hard to imagine the man Harold Bloom calls "the world's funniest human being alive" at peace and working so alone. Biographer and friend Judith Thurman, and this book, explain why. "The work provides the stimulation ... He's an incredibly disciplined man. He pays his bills on time, if something goes wrong with the car he doesn't wait until he's broke down on the Taconic Parkway to fix it. The writing is the major focus and anything that might make it harder or make it worse he sacrifices—although he wouldn't see it as a sacrifice."