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Oct. 11th, 2004 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phamosi 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.
but then, all in this big rush these riots start and the country ends up going into martial law and there are all these different conspiracy theory and then suddenly everything goes back to normal, roosevelt gets re-elected and the rest of history just goes on the same. i have a lot of problems with the end of the book, as fascinatingly written as it is. firstly, the personal narrative disappears for a little over 10 pages suddenly to relate the insane series events that constitute the frantic resolution of the political foundation for the book. and then roth returns to said personal narrative for about 40 pages, to wrap the book up in the same voice he'd used all the way through. but he'd already given away the ending! it was really hard to read the last 40 pages knowing that he'd just revealed that nothing bad happened to his family and what ended up happening with lindbergh and the anti-semitic violence around the country. so structurally, i think that was a big problem with the book. i understand that he must have had a good reason to proceed that way. he probably wanted to get the larger societal construct dealt with before describing the personal ramifications to his family, making sure the end of the book focussed on the feelings of his childhood alter-ego, because, as he'd shown at the beginning of the book, that was really the part of the story he wanted to convey. but i really think weaving the two together in a chronological fashion would have made the end of the book absolutely thrilling.
secondly, i found it preposterous to think that such a huge thing could just be a blip on the radar of american history, that history would have proceeded in total synchronicity with the real-world series events, just after lindbergh and his cronies were ousted. and it also was completely ridiculous that such a huge outburst of violence and utterly reprehensible government actions following could be quelled simply by a declaration of disgust by anne lindbergh. she herself was locked up in a mental ward following lindbergh's disappearance -- why on earth would this utterly corrupt putsch let her out? huge portions of the country might have utterly abhorred the behavior of the government in arresting all its rivals and closing the borders and instituting martial law and everything else it did at the very end, but it's very possible that under such circumstances, the government could have just shut everybody up violently. the contention is that anne morrow lindbergh was such a beloved public figure that her expression of horror would resonate with the people and immediately foil the government is easily overturned -- why on earth would the government have allowed her statement to get out in the first place. they weren't very good fascists.
the book also posits a number of conspiracy theories as to what happened to lindbergh, the most preposterous and yet somehow the one presented as most readily believable, contends that lindbergh's actions were controlled by the reich all along, as they had really been the ones to kidnap their infant son and were blackmailing him. i don't think for a minute that we're supposed to accept this as an actual explanation for the whole book, but it seems that a number of characters in the book are content to accept an ending that adds up, in principal, to saying, "and then they woke up and it was all a dream."
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.
but then, all in this big rush these riots start and the country ends up going into martial law and there are all these different conspiracy theory and then suddenly everything goes back to normal, roosevelt gets re-elected and the rest of history just goes on the same. i have a lot of problems with the end of the book, as fascinatingly written as it is. firstly, the personal narrative disappears for a little over 10 pages suddenly to relate the insane series events that constitute the frantic resolution of the political foundation for the book. and then roth returns to said personal narrative for about 40 pages, to wrap the book up in the same voice he'd used all the way through. but he'd already given away the ending! it was really hard to read the last 40 pages knowing that he'd just revealed that nothing bad happened to his family and what ended up happening with lindbergh and the anti-semitic violence around the country. so structurally, i think that was a big problem with the book. i understand that he must have had a good reason to proceed that way. he probably wanted to get the larger societal construct dealt with before describing the personal ramifications to his family, making sure the end of the book focussed on the feelings of his childhood alter-ego, because, as he'd shown at the beginning of the book, that was really the part of the story he wanted to convey. but i really think weaving the two together in a chronological fashion would have made the end of the book absolutely thrilling.
secondly, i found it preposterous to think that such a huge thing could just be a blip on the radar of american history, that history would have proceeded in total synchronicity with the real-world series events, just after lindbergh and his cronies were ousted. and it also was completely ridiculous that such a huge outburst of violence and utterly reprehensible government actions following could be quelled simply by a declaration of disgust by anne lindbergh. she herself was locked up in a mental ward following lindbergh's disappearance -- why on earth would this utterly corrupt putsch let her out? huge portions of the country might have utterly abhorred the behavior of the government in arresting all its rivals and closing the borders and instituting martial law and everything else it did at the very end, but it's very possible that under such circumstances, the government could have just shut everybody up violently. the contention is that anne morrow lindbergh was such a beloved public figure that her expression of horror would resonate with the people and immediately foil the government is easily overturned -- why on earth would the government have allowed her statement to get out in the first place. they weren't very good fascists.
the book also posits a number of conspiracy theories as to what happened to lindbergh, the most preposterous and yet somehow the one presented as most readily believable, contends that lindbergh's actions were controlled by the reich all along, as they had really been the ones to kidnap their infant son and were blackmailing him. i don't think for a minute that we're supposed to accept this as an actual explanation for the whole book, but it seems that a number of characters in the book are content to accept an ending that adds up, in principal, to saying, "and then they woke up and it was all a dream."
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.
