The Book Tower

I admit it. I’m having some trouble with Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. I hate it when this happens; a novel starts off highly enjoyable before you begin to sink into boredom. Is it my fault, his fault, the fault of circumstance? The novel is 390 pages long. I am currently on page 200, just over halfway. When I can recall these statistics so readily I know I am in trouble.

The Plot Against America has a what if scenario. What if Charles Lindbergh, most famous to us for flying from New York to Paris in 1927, had later become US President? What if, as a possible Nazi sympathiser, he had prevented the US involvement in World War II? The novel follows young Philip (born in 1933) and the rest of the Roth family during the early 1940s. They include his father, fighting an apparent lone battle against anti-semitism, his socially ambitious aunt and his cousin, crossing the border into Canada to fight with the Allies and losing a leg in battle for his efforts.

There are some interesting omens delivered of a world under Hitler’s rule (as a keen stamp collector, Philip dreams of familiar US stamps bearing the swastika), and although Roth is a skilled writer of prose his novel has so far taken me nowhere. Possibly because his what if has so many far reaching implications that he can’t possibly do it justice. I’m tempted to stop reading now and this saddens me. My high hopes for the book have been dashed because, rather than lapping it up, I’m eager to read something else. So I’m almost at the point where I’m going to cut my losses and move on.