![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 11th, 2004 09:34 ami finished the plot against america last night. it was slow to start with but then at around page 250 things started going really fast and i had to stay up and finish it. there just wasn't a good stopping point.
if you haven't read about the book, i personally found the idea for it quite compelling. it's an alternate reality sort of book, where philip roth creates a revisionist history of his childhood in which charles lindbergh is elected president on an "america first" platform, collaborating with hitler in foreign affairs and pushing suspicious programs aimed at jewish families here in the US.
i really liked this book, but there were definitely things i would change about it (much like how i felt reading everything is illuminated). i usually really like philip roth's writing, but in this particular book his tendency for writing long, long compound sentences combined with recurring odd subject-verb arrangement and made for hard reading. i kept having to stop and go back to the beginning of the sentence to find where the verb was hiding.
and the book going slowly at the beginning, i thought, was annoying but a good device to show how fascism can just slowly creep up in a situation like this one. it was sort of obnoxious, though, because it was 250 pages of getting to know a lot of thoroughly unsympathetic and unlikeable characters, unwitting fascist collaborators and those who let other concerns (mainly money) override their common sense with respect to the growing racism in the country. but i thought roth did a good job of conveying the sense of all this from a very personal, family-oriented perspective.
( caution -- major spoilers ahead! )
all in all, though, i did enjoy reading the book and thought the roth family was compellingly drawn. as i am wont to do, i spent a lot of time wondering which characters were based, however loosely, on real people, which sort of gets in the way sometimes. but it was an interesting contrast to portnoy's complaint, which comes across, in the beginning, like it must be an account of roth's own adolescence. it makes me appreciate portnoy so much more that i have an alternate version of young roth to look to, to see that portnoy is really just fiction -- although i'm sure it is reflective of the very worst facets of roth's own personality as he himself sees them in the harshest possible light. i continue to enjoy roth's work and plan to get around to reading american pastoral fairly soon.
if you haven't read about the book, i personally found the idea for it quite compelling. it's an alternate reality sort of book, where philip roth creates a revisionist history of his childhood in which charles lindbergh is elected president on an "america first" platform, collaborating with hitler in foreign affairs and pushing suspicious programs aimed at jewish families here in the US.
i really liked this book, but there were definitely things i would change about it (much like how i felt reading everything is illuminated). i usually really like philip roth's writing, but in this particular book his tendency for writing long, long compound sentences combined with recurring odd subject-verb arrangement and made for hard reading. i kept having to stop and go back to the beginning of the sentence to find where the verb was hiding.
and the book going slowly at the beginning, i thought, was annoying but a good device to show how fascism can just slowly creep up in a situation like this one. it was sort of obnoxious, though, because it was 250 pages of getting to know a lot of thoroughly unsympathetic and unlikeable characters, unwitting fascist collaborators and those who let other concerns (mainly money) override their common sense with respect to the growing racism in the country. but i thought roth did a good job of conveying the sense of all this from a very personal, family-oriented perspective.
( caution -- major spoilers ahead! )
all in all, though, i did enjoy reading the book and thought the roth family was compellingly drawn. as i am wont to do, i spent a lot of time wondering which characters were based, however loosely, on real people, which sort of gets in the way sometimes. but it was an interesting contrast to portnoy's complaint, which comes across, in the beginning, like it must be an account of roth's own adolescence. it makes me appreciate portnoy so much more that i have an alternate version of young roth to look to, to see that portnoy is really just fiction -- although i'm sure it is reflective of the very worst facets of roth's own personality as he himself sees them in the harshest possible light. i continue to enjoy roth's work and plan to get around to reading american pastoral fairly soon.
