Non-Academic Stuff I Read During Summer Vacation #9

I guess since I start teaching tomorrow morning (UM-Dearborn started classes today but I've got a Tues/Thurs teaching schedule), my summer vacation is coming to a close. So here's one last installment of my run-down of this summer's reading-material-only-tangentially-related-to-rhetoric...

Philip Roth's great novel The Plot Against America is in part allegory, and a brilliant one at that, a story that mirrors the regressive policies of the current neo-con regime. But Roth goes beyond polemic, beyond partisanship, and creates a nostalgic and vivid dystopia.

A speculative historical novel, Roth's book imagines a 1940s U.S. in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR's re-election bid and builds diplomatic ties with Nazi Germany, institutes anti-semitic public policy at home, and effectively keeps the U.S. out of WWII. The story centers around a Jewish family in New Jersey, named "Roth," and most especially the Roth's youngstest child, "Philip."

Roth creates a dystopic world with as much chilling detail as Margaret Atwood's best novels. And like the scariest dystopias, Roth's world looks awfully familiar. I'll avoid giving examples, as I don't want to give anything away. Rest assured that the fictional Lindbergh's demagogue, the-world-is-black-and-white rhetoric uses the same tropes as the rhetoric of George W. Bush (put America first!). Great piece of work.

One of the ways Roth goes beyond simplistic polemic is by turning the tables on current right-left distinctions. In Roth's world, the left advocates U.S. entry into foriegn war while the right opposes such action. This creates more than a little ambivalence in the reader, and Roth uses this switch to ironic effect.

Roth's meandering style is in full effect here. Roth writes,

It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it--generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to--while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Holy macaroni, what a sentence. And what a voice.