What If...

...Lindbergh had become President instead of Roosevelt's third term?

So posits the book club's book, The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. It was hard going at first, maybe because of its name and the swastika featured prominently on the cover. Eventually, the story pulled me in, but what made it most worth reading was the perfect use of historical figures and the tweaking of just one pivotal event from history. Everything spins outward wildly from there, and the outcome is graphic, horrifying and not at all improbable. Lindbergh, LaGuardia, Walter Winchell and, it seems, Roth himself at age 7, his brother Sandy and his parents Herman and Bess, are drawn perfectly, forced into words and actions they never really made.

The appendix runs 30 pages, with true-life biographical summaries of the historical figures, as well as Lindbergh's 1941 speech accusing the British and Jews of conspiring to lead the United States into war. Creepy- both in the sense of chilling, and in the sense of insidiousness.

My favorite authors are always, always masters of metaphor, asides and language. Philip Roth's style is not a big draw for me, but this review was helpful:

His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, as natural as breathing. Reading him, it's always the story that's in your face, never the style.
Al Alvarez
Saturday September 11, 2004
The Guardian

Very true. The review also says that to assume his style isn't effortful is both presumptuous and insulting. Here are some quotes from the author, which also added to my appreciation for the book:

"I was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood," he says, "and never saw a skullcap, a beard, sidelocks - ever, ever, ever - because the mission was to live here, not there. There was no there. If you asked your grandmother where she came from, she'd say, 'Don't worry about it. I forgot already.' To the Jews, this was Zion."

"The great American writers are regionalists. It's in the American grain. Think of Faulkner in Mississippi or Updike and the town in Pennsylvania he calls Brewer. It's there on the page, brick by brick. What are these places like? Who lives there? What are the forces determining their lives? ... I hadn't yet discovered my own place, that town across the river called Newark..."

Leading me, of course, to reflect on my love for Ivan Doig, Woody Guthrie, Willa Cather, Marie Sandoval, and even Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm not putting Philip Roth in my list, don't misunderstand. But Philip Roth really does get it right- bringing alive not just the brick by brick of his region-but also the accents, the sounds, the foods, the stares, the gossip, the industry, the common struggles, and what makes the strangers strange.

My husband commented that this was a surprising pick for my book club. Maybe so, but we've read the popular fictional best-selling bookclub favorites, we've read poems in translation, we've read Michael Pollan on global agro-business, and Jeffrey Sachs on ending poverty, and we've read, most surprising of all, Stephen King. I'm coming to believe that this group of intrepid readers will try anything in good faith, and evaluate its merits objectively before rating it.