It is not clear when precisely it happened, but at some point while our backs were turned Philip Roth seems to have metamorphosed from enfant terrible into old master. This one-time Peck's bad boy of American letters, who first made a name for himself with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 when he was still in his mid-twenties, has become one of only three living writers whose oeuvre is being published in a canonical, multi-volume Library of America edition (the other two being Saul Bellow and John Updike). He enjoys the enviably unassailable reputation that sustains a writer through good books and bad.
Over the years, God knows, he has produced both. But he is never less than a novelist of stupendous vitality and invention, and for sheer variety of literary ambition he may be without contemporary peer. Beginning as a quasi-disciple of Saul Bellow, he has subsequently tipped his hat towards influences as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ring Lardner, Milan Kundera, Jorge Luis Borges and Lenny Bruce. The results are always unmistakably Rothian, but the man commands a repertory company not merely of fictional characters but of authorial identities.
In his long career (almost 30 books to date), there have been two major turning points, moments when he evolved from one kind of novelist into another. After achieving a measure of mainstream prominence by minding his literary manners and writing three accomplished novels and a number of short stories in a conventional style, he found himself emboldened (or perhaps compelled) to give free rein to a private, obscene, combustible bravura previously shared only in conversation with friends. The result was that boisterous yawp of a novel, Portnoy's Complaint.
It is impossible for anyone other than Roth to gauge the effort the book may have required him to write, or the courage to publish. But it was, I would hazard, a liberating experience all the same, one in which rage and exhilaration were inextricable: a deliberate, zestful poke in the eye to those critics, colleagues, friends and family members who thought they had him safely pegged. I would go even further - since the theme recurs in several of his fictions - and venture that he was enacting on a literary level a mode of almost adolescent rebellion that he had certainly gone through in his own life: a bright, well-behaved, parent-pleasing bar mitzvah boy had come face to face with his own unruly id, and all of a sudden a world of unsanctioned, transgressive pleasures presented itself to him. He liked what he saw, and decided it would be a hoot to give his id its head. The appalled chagrin his subsequent behaviour was bound to provoke must have been a significant part of its appeal. Similarly, it is unlikely to have distressed him at the time of publication that Jewish readers of Portnoy were among the most scandalised; writing it was an act of Oedipal subversiveness. The books that came after had a new energy and a new comic intensity; he no longer aspired to be either a nice Jewish boy or a dutiful apprentice dedicated to pleasing his masters.
The other great turning point, less remarked upon but of at least equal significance, occurred with 1995's Sabbath's Theater. This superb, repellent novel, one of Roth's best, strikes me as an even greater affront to conventional sensibilities than its famous predecessor. In it, we are implicitly invited to bestow affection on a protagonist almost devoid of sympathetic human qualities other than talent, pep and gargantuan appetite. It represents, I think, a completion of the work Portnoy had started; it is a book that enthusiastically embraces a degree of emotional nastiness and appears to endorse a range of misbehaviour that a lesser novelist would have lavished only on a villain. While less obviously confessional than much of his other fiction, it represents a deeper and more personal kind of defiance. Yes, it seems to say, this too is part of being human, and I no longer feel the need to excuse or defend my character's lapses or distance myself from his unpleasantness.
This novel ushered in a period that critics have now come to regard as Roth's Indian summer. Perhaps paradoxically, the books that followed Sabbath's Theater are numbered among his most tender, generous and compassionate: the trilogy comprising American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain (published, respectively, in 1997, 1998 and 2000). This is not to suggest that Sabbath's Theater somehow purged Roth of his emotional poison; indeed, for all its tenderness, the trilogy contains more than its share of such poison. But writing Sabbath does seem to have engendered a new strain in Roth's work, to have enabled a tangy and idiosyncratic integration of the honey and bile that were always present, warring with one another for pre-eminence. The short novel that came after the trilogy, 2001's The Dying Animal, intensified this poignant, valedictory tone.
And now, in his new novel, The Plot Against America, Roth draws upon any number of previous techniques and devices peculiar to his fiction: the overt or putatively overt autobiography of The Facts, Deception, Patrimony and Operation Shylock; the acrid New Jersey nostalgia and indirect autobiography of Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life As a Man and the Zuckerman books; the extravagant (though sometimes deadly serious) play of the imagination of Our Gang, The Great American Novel and The Breast; and most relevantly, the counterfactual inventiveness of The Counterlife.
Roth posits a 1940 America in which the Republican party nominates for president not Wendell Willkie, the progressive businessman who in reality ran unsuccessfully against Franklin Roosevelt, but aviator Charles Lindbergh, a popular American hero who did in historical fact evince some fascist sympathies and some antisemitic beliefs, and whose nomination was briefly contemplated by isolationist Republicans. In Roth's novel, Lindbergh accepts the nomination and wins the election; the repercussions, for both the Roth family in Newark and the country at large, are the subject of the book.
In its early stages, Roth's counterfactual history is constructed with masterly specificity and verisimilitude. Despite the distress of the Roth family and their neighbours, initially nothing dreadful ensues. Lindbergh vows to keep the US out of the European war. He institutes a programme that sends urban Jewish teenagers to spend their summer months with Gentile families in the country, a programme bearing the hilariously anodyne name, "Just Folks." He excites opposition among internationalists, New Dealers and Jews (some of the latter emigrate to Canada), but enjoys enormous popularity in the country at large. Soon, even some liberals and Jews manage to find redeeming qualities in the Lindbergh administration. Roth creates one such, a Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark, who quickly earns a distinguished position in Roth's gallery of pompous, fatuous Jewish authority figures. Bengelsdorf begins an affair with the author's aunt (are we perhaps approaching the wellsprings of that Oedipal rage?) and soon the couple become intimates, virtual courtiers, of the president and first lady. As these matters proceed, intimations of more sinister events occasionally intrude. There is a splendidly realised family visit to Washington in which the Roth family are exposed to antisemitic taunts and find themselves evicted from their hotel. There are house calls from the FBI. There is a non-aggression pact signed between Lindbergh and Hitler, a treaty between the US and Japan, and a lavish White House state dinner for the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Most skilful of all is the portrayal of pusillanimous acquiescence by respectable liberals. This has been a recurrent source of rage for Roth, the moral abdication that hides behind a façade of mannerly conduct. He makes the interesting (though ultimately unconvincing) choice of Walter Winchell - real-life gossip columnist, New York boulevardier, vulgarian, Jew - as the most outspoken opponent of the new administration. This provides the occasion not only for some unconvincing plot developments, but also for one virtuoso piece of satiric writing, a New York Times editorial chastising Winchell for his posturing. The tone is pitch perfect, the elevation of tree over forest directly on target.
Still, the book eventually begins to lose its way, revealing that predisposition towards improvisation over planning that has marred some of Roth's previous work. When Winchell runs for president, when riots reminiscent of Kristallnacht erupt across America, and when perfunctory explanations of Lindbergh's motives seize control of the narrative - involving Nazi complicity in the kidnapping of his son and German blackmail, dovetailing into a denouement that includes a presidential disappearance and a vice-presidential coup - the whole enterprise begins to sink under the weight of its own extravagant implausibility. Roth has been so punctilious about verisimilitude in the first 250 pages or so of the book that one reads on with a sinking heart.
What of contemporary resonance? On the most literal level, the whole idea seems far-fetched. Antisemitism, although certainly historically apt, is an oddly irrelevant trope for today's political situation. No doubt as a private prejudice it still persists throughout the US, but very few American Jews now living have felt its sting. Nevertheless, it is hard to doubt that Roth had the current Bush administration in mind while writing The Plot Against America. In the novel, a coterie of small-minded men and women with a narrow worldview and a secret agenda exploit legitimate national anxiety for their own purposes, and gradually devise ways to confound constitutional norms. And so, even if official antisemitism is no longer a factor in American political discourse, the spectre of a home-grown, domesticated fascism is not entirely far-fetched.
Despite its disappointing finish, the book offers substantial rewards. An artist of Roth's protean ambitions inevitably fails at times. But on those rare occasions when he does fail, he never fails to fail arrestingly and provocatively. That in itself is a kind of triumph.
