Philip Roth: The plot against America

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

We were a happy family in 1940," writes Philip Roth of a family called the Roths who live in a working-class suburb of Newark. This is a place where the moms are mostly stay-at-home moms and "the dads worked 50, 60, even 70 or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labour-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars ..."

And still had time to help organise the Parent-Teacher Association.

This is a neighbourhood where folks pull together. A neighbourhood where "the frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge" are so close together you can hear your neighbour's radio through the walls.

Roth's parents, the hard-working, moral compasses of his family and his story, are outgoing, hospitable people, in pursuit of the American dream: the better house, the car in the garage, a good education for the kids, a holiday in Washington saved for thriftily, a little set aside every week. His father is an insurance salesman earning a little under $50 a week. His mother runs the house and protects her family.

Some, or all of this, is the stuff of memoir. It is lovingly remembered; written with an engaging and engrossing affection.

A favourite Roth device — the cover tells us this is a novel — it is also a indication that the truth (or some aspects of the truth) are about to become fiction. And his book about a family begins with this: "Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear."

The fear arises from an imagined event, heard through the walls, on the radios of the Newark community where "all were Jews".

What these good, hard-working families hear is that Charles A Lindbergh, aviation hero, who became a martyred hero when his baby son was kidnapped and murdered, the isolationist who argued for America to stay out of the war, the man who called Hitler a great man, is to run for President.

The Republicans invited Lindbergh to run in 1940. Roth has him defeating Franklin Roosevelt. For little Philip Roth, aged 7 and an avid stamp collector who has Lindbergh's face in his album, "Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate".

His family is about to learn about hate. On the long-awaited trip to Washington, they are turfed out their modest hotel room — they are now loud-mouth Jews and unwelcome.

His brother Sandy is sent away for the summer to a Kentucky farm under a scheme called, with a ghastly and ominously folksy ring, "Just Folks".

This All-American family now have to learn to become American. They are told they have been chosen, along with other Jewish families, to be relocated in a plan to disperse Jews throughout America to break up their communities — and sold as opportunity.

Located in a fantasy version of history, Roth's book imagines the unimaginable (ha) in wholly believable fiction. The best writing makes fictional characters real. He already has his characters. He already has his story. He has young Philip Roth recount that what had been lost was that "huge endowment of personal security I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world."

For this 7-year-old, that security vanished when this perfectly realised fictional scenario was first heard on the wireless in Newark. Modern-day Americans watched theirs explode on television sets all over the nation on September, 9, 2001.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer

* Jonathan Cape, $54.95