Reading for the Plot? Philip Roth's The Plot Against America

AJS Review

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 305-312

  Sokoloff, Naomi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012526803     PISSN: 03640094     EISSN: 14754541     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009406000146     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), xiii.
2. Philip Roth, The Plot against America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
3. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 11-12.
4. Though the characters in the novel have some idea about all of this, readers in 2004 and beyond know much more than they do, so the fear-inducing effect is in some ways heightened.
5. Phil Patton, “Lee Defeats Grant,” American Heritage, September 1999, 42.
6. A Web site devoted to this topic, www.uchronia.com, lists thousands of counterfactual novels, including The Plot against America.
7. J. M. Coetzee, “What Philip Knew,” New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004, 4-6; Alan Cooper, “It Can Happen Here, or All in the Family Values: Surviving The Plot against America,” in Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, ed. Derek Parker Royal (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 241-54; and Ruth Wisse, “In Nazi Newark,” Commentary, December 2004, 65-69. In “Counterlives,” New Yorker, September 20, 2004, 96 ff., Joan Acocella offers an admiring review of the novel, reading it as a satirical fable that is at once comical and grotesque.
8. Clive James, “Fatherland,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2004, 143-48.
9. Paul Berman, “What If It Happened Here?” New York Times Book Review, October 3, 2004, 1 ff.
10. Critics have long viewed rebelliousness-especially rebellion against one's parents-as a major focus of Roth's fiction. For example, Judith Paterson Jones and Guinevera A. Nance devote an entire chapter, “Good Girls and Boys Gone Bad,” to this theme in their monograph Philip Roth (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 9-86.
11. Debra B. Shostak identifies failed attempts to escape from history as a persistent theme in Roth's late fiction, especially the novels of the 1990s, esp. The Human Stain and American Pastoral. See her discussion in Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
12. For a discussion of orphans in the texts of Sholem Aleichem and a range of modern Jewish authors (including Ch.N. Bialik, Aharon Appelfeld, Henry Roth, and others), see Naomi Sokoloff, Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
13. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 104.
14. Jason Cowley, “The Terror of the Unforeseen,” New Statesman, October 11, 2004, 48-49; and Berman, “What If,” 16.
15. Cowley, “The Terror of the Unforeseen,” 49.
16. The distinction between narrated events and the narration of them is central to narratological approaches to literature. For classic summaries of these concepts and the terms used to refer to them (fabula and sjužet, histoire and discours, story and discourse), see, for example, Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lowin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); and Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
17. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 23.
18. Roth describes the genesis of the novel in “The Story Behind The Plot Against America,” New York Times Book Review, September 9, 2004, 10-12.
19. Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 30.
20. For an extensive discussion of Roth's characters’ avoidance of or reentry into history, see Shostak, Countertexts, esp. 230-68. For an informative analysis of similar issues in connection with The Counterlife, see Matthew Wilson, “Fathers and Sons in History: Philip Roth's The Counterlife,” Prooftexts 11, no. 1 (January 1991): 41-56. Wilson deftly analyzes that novel's weaving together of history as master narrative with family history in all its heterogeneity. Additional commentary on Roth's views of Jewish history can be found in Steven Milowitz, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer (New York: Garland, 2000). Milowitz finds the Holocaust to be a profound, central obsession of Roth's work. This study argues, a bit oddly, that even the selfcenteredness and self-absorption of characters such as Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman originate in Holocaust awareness, because to ignore self is “to let the victimizer win” (152)-that is, not to challenge Nazi efforts to depersonalize Jews.