A celebrity is elected president of the United States. What could go wrong?
Wait, what do you think I'm talking about? I'm talking about the Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America. In an alternate version of history, Charles Lindbergh, aviator hero, running on an isolationist platform, beats F.D.R. in 1940.
What happens to the United States? What happens to the lives of the Roth family in Weequahic, New Jersey? Federal programs like OAA (the Office of American Absorption) takes young Jewish children out of their urban homes and sends them to the heartland. The Homestead 42 program relocates Jewish families to the south and midwest. You know, so they can "learn more about America." If this sounds disturbingly anti-Semitic, that's the point.
I haven't watched the HBO miniseries because I wanted to read the novel first. The writing is sublime, the prose is glorious. But The Plot Against America is also unsettling, terrifying, and whew, thank God it's fiction. Unless... maybe it's not.
The postscript at the end of book includes a bibliography, a chronology of major figures, and a speech by Lindbergh given in Des Moines on September 11, 1941.
