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Roth has won almost every literary prize-the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Award (twice)-just about everything but the Nobel and that's a strong possibility for the 71-year-old author. Why not honor him with science fiction's top award, named for SF magazine pioneer Hugo Gernsback? A novel by Philip K. Dick with a similar theme to Roth's, "The Man in the High Castle," won the Hugo for best novel in 1963. Check out www.uchronia.net for a comprehensive survey of alternate history.

Roth's latest novel (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages, $26) posits that Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a third term as president in 1940 and lost - to Charles A. Lindbergh. This is not good news for the British, who want the U.S. to enter the war against the Nazis and it's bad news for the nation's 4.5 million Jews, who are specifically named by Lindbergh as part of a group seeking America's entry into the "latest European war."

Lindbergh actually made a speech-on Sept. 11, 1941-with those accusations. Roth shifts it to 1940, during the presidential campaign, and the inflammatory address in a country eager to stay out of Europe's latest unilateral bloody madness wins him the White House. Roth includes the Des Moines, Iowa address at an America First Committee rally as part of an appendix that includes a chronology of actual events.

History buffs will enjoy "The Plot Against America" and so will those who find a conspiracy theory on every grassy knoll. America in 1940 was a volatile place, with ethnic tensions everywhere, as German Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans weighed in on the wars being waged by their ancestral homelands. Most German Americans were loyal, but in cities like Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati and New York, the pro-Nazi Bund drew huge crowds to places like Madison Square Garden.

Across the Hudson River in Newark, N.J., precocious young Philip Roth narrates the story from 1940 to late 1942, from the age of 7 to 9. He tells how his family is affected by the election of a president who flies personally to Iceland to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. His older brother Sandy at first is enthusiastic about spending a summer as a farm worker in Kentucky as part of the Lindbergh Administration's "Just Folks" campaign. It's designed to get big city ethnic Americans out in the country, but somehow it only applies to Jews, not to urban gentiles like the Irish, Germans or Italians.

Lindbergh (1902-1974) may not have been as anti-Semitic as Henry Ford, Gerald L.K. Smith or Father Charles Coughlin-all of whom figure in Roth's "counter-history" - but by using the term "Jewish race" in his Des Moines speech, he clearly showed his bigotry. There's no "Jewish race" - just the human race, but such casual bigotry was common 64 years ago. Hotel ads in the 1930s and 1940s routinely said "Restricted to a Gentile Clientele" or similar wording. The Roth family finds out first-hand what happens when a Jewish family stays at one such hotel on a trip to Washington to see the sights.

The anti-Semitic urban riots near the end of the book echo the actual black and Hispanic riots that took place in Harlem, Detroit and Los Angeles-among other cities-during World War II.

By focusing his story on the Roths -- Herman, Bess, Philip, Sandy - and their relatives, neighbors and friends, Roth personalizes the story in a way that draws the reader in and sustains him/her through some slow-going parts in the book's mid-section. After "The Plot Against America," most readers - especially those who are history-deficient - will probably want to follow up on what actually took place in those years and months before Pearl Harbor.

As a fan of both Roth and SF/alternate history this was a natural for me. I'd really like to see Roth take home that Hugo.. He would be in distinguished company: Philip Dick, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, J.K. Rowling, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Azimov, Arthur C. Clarke, John Brunner, William Gibson, Walter M. Miller Jr. and many more.
 
More Book Reviews by David M. Kinchen
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— 11/24/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bush, Blair and Iraq; A Shrink at Nuremberg; Updike's Sexy Geek; Potomac Fever Smites an Academic
— 12/15/04 BOOK REVIEWS: 'Past Imperfect' Covers Complexities of History, Plagiarism Issues; 'His Excellency' Reveals George Washington's Accomplishments
— 12/29/04 BOOK REVIEWS: ‘de Kooning’ Chronicles Rise of American Art Supremacy; ‘Adams vs. Jefferson’ Shows That Controversial Presidential Elections are Nothing New
— 01/17/05 BOOK REVIEW: Max Hastings on Germany's 'Armageddon' as Allies from West, East Conquer Third Reich
— 01/24/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Images of America: Huntington’ Displays Glorious Architecture of West Virginia’s First Planned City
— 01/27/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Auschwitz’ Personalizes Horror That Should Never Be Forgotten

David M. Kinchen is the Editor of HuntingtonNews.Net, repsponses and article submissions can be made to .
 
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