I have decided to compose full reviews of my favorite book read each month. January 2020’s first place prize goes to The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

Review: The Plot Against America

Setting: New Jersey, USA/1940

Readers know Philip Roth as the man who fictionalizes reality. Or turns reality into fiction. Wait, or is it both? He tends to write from an autobiographical standpoint, making no exception in The Plot Against America. The blurred lines of his stories make it difficult to tell what has happened to him and what has not.

The narrative follows seven-year-old Roth at the start of World War II. Charles A. Lindbergh, who has been elected President of the United States of America, refuses to either aid the Allies in the war or denounce the Nazi regime. As a result, the Roth family’s New Jersey Jewish community, as well as those all around the country, begin to feel fearful of attacks at home from their fellow Americans.

Roth takes the reader on the emotional rollercoaster of anxiety as his fellow countrymen begin to make his family feel unAmerican as the Lindbergh administration ignites anti-semitic feelings throughout the nation.

Though this book displays little action and more emotional, descriptive narrative, I loved every page of it. Many of the “America First” sentiments and presidential behavior from which the Everyman takes as permission to imitate seems to parallel my country’s current political climate even though it was published in 2004.

Favorite Quotes

“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn’t. Except when it does.”

“It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.” 

“If anybody asks, ‘Can you do this job? Can you handle it?’ you tell ’em ‘Absolutely.’ By the time they find out that you can’t, you’ll have already learned, and the job’ll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.” 

Rating

4/5 STARS

HBO has developed The Plot Against America into a mini-series and I’m so excited to watch it! Thank you to my co-worker Zach who gifted me this book as a farewell from my short life in Virginia.

My Other January 2020 Reads

What I’m Reading Now

For daily updates, bookish photos, and discussions follow my Bookstagram!