The Plot Against America by Philip Roth tells an alternate history--America in 1940 if Charles Lindbergh, not FDR, was elected president--from the perspective of a seven-year-old protagonist named Philip Roth. The alternate timeline is more believable than the precociousness of the narrator, and it's a good novel on the whole. Roth was one of America's greatest writers, and this novel is buoyed by his great talent. Some of Roth's favorite motifs are present: comic set pieces, worried Jewish elders, beautiful and essayistic asides. Mercifully, it isn't as sexual or misogynist as Roth often gets, probably due to the pre-pubescent narrative voice, or the gravity of the subject matter.
The strongest part of the novel were the interpersonal tensions that arose from the election of a fascist sympathizer. The central question of how much, if any, danger the Jews were actually in drove the conflict. Vague paranoia collided with naïve optimism. Families were forced to navigate the hyperbolic declarations. In an era with greater stakes than our own, but with no social media, it made for a fascinating thought experiment. It's impossible for readers of this novel, written in 2004, set in the early 1940s, to not think of Trump, Covid, George Floyd, polarization, etc.
