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The Plot Against America
A Novel
by Philip Roth


7.8

based on 33 reviews
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based on 15 votes
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Everyman

Official Publisher Site

In this alternative history of mid-20th century America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist imagines a United States where anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi flyer Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. It is told mainly from the point of view of a fictionalized version of the author's own family in New Jersey.

Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages
09/2004
$26.00

ISBN: 0618509283

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist Brad Hooper

This magnificent novel is both appropriate to today's headlines and timeless for its undermining of the blind sentiment that "it can't happen here." [Aug 2004, p.1874]

Boston Globe William H. Pritchard

As always with a novel by Roth, we must resort to the indefinable but essential term ''voice" to indicate the animating force that drives the narrative. Never has it been more nuanced nor less a matter of flamboyant performance than in ''The Plot Against America."

Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse

It turns theories into history and obsession into art and makes for some of the most fascinating reading of the season.

Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles

Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read - now.

London Review Of Books Michael Wood

I called the book 'astonishing', but what astonishes is not this wild counter-history - it is presented too plausibly for that - or any fireworks in the prose, which is uncommonly sober, though always elegant. What's astonishing is the way Roth puts together the stories of the shaken Jewish family and an America that can't see what's happening to it, that isn't shaken enough.

Kirkus Reviews

Hilarious and terrifying by turns, it's a sumptuous interweaving of narrative, characterization, speculation, and argument that joins The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993) at the summit of Roth's achievement. [15 Jul 2004, p.655]

Publishers Weekly

In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations. [12 Jul 2004, p.44]

The Guardian Blake Morrison

Ranks with his great trilogy of the late-90s.

The New York Times Book Review Paul Berman

A terrific political novel... sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.

The New Yorker Joan Acocella

It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as it goes along.

San Francisco Chronicle Daniel Handler

Roth's most powerful work to date.... As crucial as history, it is also as ferocious.

Washington Post Jonathan Yardley

It may well be his best.... The Plot Against America is far and away the most outward-looking, expansive, least narcissistic book Roth has written.

The Economist

One of his finest.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lee Henderson

A humane and anxious novel about the dangers of political extremism.

The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia

A surprisingly subtle and stirring novel about family.

USA Today Bob Minzesheimer

The writing is brilliant when the focus is on the Roths and their neighborhood.... But Roth lapses into melodrama when he tries to tie up all the loose ends.

Village Voice Gabriel Brownstein

The book is empowered by its personal nature; its force lies in its emotional proximity, these super-real recollections of the child as he discovers himself to be persecuted.

The Independent Johann Hari

Like all Roth's fiction, this novel is dazzling but flawed.

The Independent Clive Sinclair

For some reason the novel never quite sustains the intensity of those early scenes in Washington.

The Nation James Wolcott

A cautionary tale about how easily the country could slide into fascism, slipping into it until the black waters bury our heads, the novel doesn't seem so much intricately plotted (though it is--at the end, too much so) as anxiously daydreamed into being.

Salon Laura Miller

By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.

LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard

The Plot Against America's real strength, though, lies in its portrait of a family on the verge of disintegration and a nation in the grip of hysteria.

Los Angeles Times Greil Marcus

Whatever else it is, it is a fabulous yarn.[22 Sep 2004]

New York Observer Adam Begley

A daring imaginative exercise, it's a way to see both the country and the Roth family more clearly by making everything thrillingly strange.

New York Review Of Books J. M. Coetzee

What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humor, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip.

Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor

Rich as it is, it has one important flaw: As we read along, Roth cannot quite make us forget that this book is a fantasy, that the things related in it never happened.

Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler

Better put together than The Human Stain, The Plot Against America is another frighteningly intense performance.

Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham

Written in clean, straightforward prose, it solidifies Roth's reputation, earned in such novels as American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, as our greatest living anatomist of ordinary people caught up in America's periodic eruptions of collective madness.

Atlantic Monthly Clive James

Roth does a pretty good job of spoiling the story himself, by dishing out improbabilities with shameless haste; if it were not for the quality of the writing, you could be reading The Da Vinci Code. Luckily for the reader's mental health, Roth is no more capable of an uninteresting sentence than Dan Brown is capable of an interesting one.

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

With this fascinating, fertile material, Roth has spun an unconvincing fantasy that falls far short of his finest work.

Daily Telegraph David Flusfeder

Roth is superb as ever on the ferocious, kitchen-table disputes and the half-lies of family life. But the "history" wears us down.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

If the telescope turned on America in this novel sorely lacks the verisimilitude and keen social observation found in ''American Pastoral'' and ''The Human Stain,'' the microscope it turns on the Roths still provides an intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history.

Wall Street Journal Thomas Fleming

What does this all add up to? Less than one would have hoped.

The average user rating for this book is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 15 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

[Anonymous] gave it a5:
This book had it's moments, but over all I was bored with it and had no sympathy for the characters, I didn't find them at all likable. I could not connect with the characters or get into the story at all.

Moki C gave it a10:
This is a fabulous written story. We feel like everythins that's told is History by that family's point of view. Roth is quite an outdtanding writer.

Wayne H gave it a9:
Once again Roth takes us where few dare to tread. Specifically to a dark, serious place that mirrors the times about which Philip Roth writes. In this instance the parallels are clear: Facism, Nazism and today's power grab by a generally unsympathetic goverment. Moreover, Roth uses his namesake characters' stamp collection as a historical marker. What do the stamps tll us of a cultures history and what happens when the stamps dissappear? Roth gives us a snapshot of not only what might have been but largely what is. Here we have a talented story-teller that is among the most eloquent of American writers. Or is it a telented writer who is among our best story tellers? I loved it. Go Roth!

Gnarles gave it an8:
Not since Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full" has a book been so wonderful to me in its build-up, only to flame out on an ending that can't sustain what has come before. That aside, "The Plot Against America" is another great read by a writing master. Thanks to the author's willingness to tell the story from the point of view of himself and his family in the early 40's, the scenario is seamless and impressively believeable, even though you can never fully detach from the reality of what really happened. The sentences often crackle with real tension and wit, making it fun to read. Roth takes a real risk with this project and brings it off beautifully until the aforementioned climax, which feels weirdly anti-climactic for all its brooding, careful set-up. Particularly ludicrous is the "war" the U.S. has with another country at the very end (though fans of the South Park movie will be quite amused). Definitely worth a read, but Roth fans have a head-start for sure.

Jm H gave it an8:
Uneven--riding the spectrum from brilliant to indulgent. As a sentence creator, Roth may be on par with Henry James and William Faulkner. The novel is quite believable until the anti-climactic, slipshod resolution of events. One is struck by the audaciousness of portraying the author's own family members as well as people like Lindbergh and Winchell. My first full length Roth novel, and I was quite pleased on the whole.

Mordecai B gave it an8:
Great family drame written with humor, insight and scope. A little awkward when discussing the "current events".

Fred L gave it a9:
OK, I'm a real Roth fan, and as an American Jew am definitely in his demographic, but this is a breathtaking and frightening read by a master who is near the top of his game. (This is not as good as The Human Stain, but that is a prohibitively high standard to hold almost any book against, the upper-deck walk-off home run we all were waiting for Roth to write.) The matter-of-fact plausibility of The Plot...'s evolving nightmare is what makes this book hard to put down and likely to interfere your life's other obligations.

The Plot Against America A Novel by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
A Novel
by Philip Roth