FictionPerhaps all that history has to offer is the facts. Perhaps those facts are not even all that important? Maybe the real truths, the real fears, the terrors that shape each individual happen to come from within, created by that not overly reliable, if all consuming, source known as memory abetted by apprehension? Novelist Philip Roth from Newark, New Jersey, knows all about the tensions created by fact versus memory; truth versus fear.
For much of his early to mid-career as a great American writer, he appeared to have been exclusively concerned with the difficulty of being just that - a great American Jewish male writer; a problem certainly, but hardly the stuff of tragedy. Yet things can, and do, change.
All that repression, all that angst, all that ego, all that anger. Never the easiest of writers, the perennial brash Jewish kid, whose major story seemed to consist of his frenzied sexual experiences starring himself as a novelist, answered all charges of writing autobiographical fiction by simply writing more of the stuff. And when it came time to pen an autobiography of sorts, he wrote a fictionalised one. The Facts was published in 1988 and it ensured, as Roth intended, that readers remained confused and kept guessing, lulled by the rhythmic, conversational and expansive prose, as well as the gags and the energy.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was published in 1959. It won the National Book Award and caused some offence. He has been famous since the publication, 10 years later, of Portnoy's Complaint, an infamously funny tale of one man's sexuality at the mercy of oppressively loving Jewish parents. His books have increased and multiplied, including The Counterlife (1986), a masterwork of technical ingenuity,but his themes remained the same - his life, his story, his sexuality, his status as an American Jewish writer incapable of forgetting anything.
Yet,Roth, the gifted chronicler of self, was shaping up to become an inspired and despairing chronicler of his country. But not even his most devoted fans could have been prepared for the miracle that is American Pastoral (1997), a profound, haunting and haunted elegy, shaped by intelligence and earned wisdom, and honed by regret. Here was Roth's beautiful lament to his country.
In that novel he finally began listening to the voices around him as well as to the ones inside his head. Nathan Zuckerman, famous novelist and Roth alter ego, now the narrator as witness, had learnt to listen and listen is what he continued to do in I Married A Communist (1998), in which betrayals, both personal and political, emerge as the central themes.
More riches followed. The majestic though belated maturity of Roth continued with The Human Stain (2000), in which an ageing college professor learns the price of political incorrectness, as well as the new urgency of a failing sexuality recharged by science. All the while, the US was replacing himself as his central character.
Roth's new novel, The Plot Against America, is as passionate, as funny and as heartfelt as each of his three big recent books, only more so. The difference this time is that there is no buffer, no middle man, no Zuckerman Roth alter ego. The narrator is the young Philip Roth, or rather frightened, little Philip Roth aged seven to 10, as remembered, as recaptured by the novelist.
It is a deeply personal book, his most personal yet, or is it? The key to this powerful new novel is quite brilliantly contained in an earlier book, Patrimony (1991), an under-celebrated work of non-fiction.
In it, Roth Junior presents his dad, a tough, honest, Newark man, an American and a Jew, a father and widowed husband, who even at 86 resented dying of a brain tumour that made his face collapse. Patrimony looked as his father's death, it recorded the disintegration of the old man's body, the final betrayal of a man who had often been let down not only by life, but by the business of being American and Jewish.
By reading this earlier book, it becomes easier to chart the path that has led Roth towards the towering achievement of not only this dazzling new novel, but of the epic power he unleashed in American Pastoral. Perhaps Roth was wrong to expose the old man's slow, painful and humiliating death. Perhaps the novelist should have refrained from writing it all down, including how he had to clean up the bathroom, the walls as well as the floor, after his father's post operative stupor ended in his having relieved himself with a nightmare explosion. The novelist's eye proved relentless but also human, as Roth recalled the day they were walking down the street and he took his father's now ill-fitting dentures, placing them in his own pocket.
Patrimony is but one of Roth's memorials to his beloved father, the same father whom the narrator of The Breast (1972) - while suffering from a Kafkaesque complex which convinces him he is a female breast - imagines thinking "he teaches this stuff, in a college?"
Now in The Plot Against America, another paternal memorial of sorts, Roth looks further back, to when his childhood began to shift from uncomplicated domestic routine to chaos. "Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear." It is a study of an American family, a Jewish-American family - Roth's parents, his brother and himself - living in a Jewish-American community and reluctant to exchange it for anywhere else in which they would become the only Jews in the neighbourhood.
It is 1940 and Herman Roth is 39, an insurance agent and just about managing to support his wife and sons. A man of beliefs, he believes in America. Roth senior has opinions.
" 'Because what is history?' he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. 'History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man - that'll be history too someday.'"
Little Philip, living in the shadow of his older brother, Sandy, who can draw anything, finds comfort in his stamp album. But America begins to change. Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero, Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semite, is nominated by the Republicans for the presidency and succeeds in defeating Franklin Roosevelt. The worst happens.
Roth re-imagines history, he is not recording it. Sure, the facts have been changed - Lindbergh never ran for president, he didn't disappear during a flight; he never became president, he didn't invite Nazis to the White House. But by taking an iconic American hero and turning him into the enemy of the American Jews - and Lindbergh's anti-war stance did anger other Americans as well - Roth is offering a fictionalised version of the essential paranoia of the American Jew. Roth's message is neither satire nor polemic. By fictionalising history, he is exploring the difference between Jews in the US and elsewhere. An American Jew is American first, and Jewish second.
The narrative is carried by a rush of "what if?" and somehow the facts as history records them no longer matter. Put the history in a bottom drawer - though Roth does include a responsible Postcript of 26 pages of historical data to assist his readers .
What does matter is the fear, hurt and bewilderment that Roth evokes. The novel is far bigger than even its chilling parallels with today's American tragedy because Roth has caught the fear of real people, people he knew, including his father, mother and his child self. Be it 1940, as he has chosen, or 2004, as it could well be, Roth's thesis is that of a great country misled into chaos, and bullied into compromise - as it is now.
With Lindbergh in the White House, even Jewish stoolies, including Philip's aunt, are recruited in the drive to disperse Jewish communitities. The systematic upheaval and subsequent isolation and growing paranoia of the American Jew begins andwith it, the Roth household enters turmoil.
Alvin, Herman's troublesome orphaned nephew, refusing all offers of employment, sets off to fight in the Canadian army. Meanwhile, Sandy, despatched by cunning Aunt Evelyn, spends the summer engaged in an American version of relocating the Jewish population and on his return is used to spread the message of how good life can be elsewhere.
When Sandy is told that Alvin has been wounded at the front, Sandy asks his mother "Who wounded him?", leaving Philip Roth as narrator to remark that Sandy's reaction was as if their mother "were reporting an occurrence in our neighbourhood rather than in Nazi-occupied Europe, where people were being maimed, wounded and killed all the time".
The narrative resounds with fear and sharp Jewish humour, outrage and the presence of real people not merely ghosts. But aside from the wit, the warmth, the atmosphere and the inspired characterisation, Roth's triumph lies in the narrative voice.
Young Phil is a real boy - innocent, cunning, terrified of everything, including being Jewish, convinced the family dead populate the damp cellar, and also resourceful. "A new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood."
When he loses his precious stamp album he is inconsolable. "I envisioned a horde of orphans spotting the album in the woods and tearing it apart with their filthy hands. I saw them pulling out the stamps and eating them and stomping on them and flushing them by the handful down the toilet in their terrible bathroom."
There are wonderful set pieces, such as the day he thought he had locked himself in a neighbour's bathroom, or his carefully planned attempt to run away, dressed in the stolen clothes of the irritating kid downstairs. Elsewhere, having written a bogus note from a nun, he lies his way into the local cinema to see forbidden news footage featuring his disgraced Aunt Evelyn visiting the White House.
While sitting on a bus, little Philip watches a couple of nuns, "simultaneously hoping and dreading that I'd overhear them say something in Catholic". Alvin's war wound is serious. The family walks around the reality, leaving boorish Uncle Monty - "with the ever-present cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth" - and brother of Alvin's dead father to ask the question: "How the hell did you manage to lose a leg?" Uncle Monty offers little sympathy. "So now what? You going to lay there living off disability checks? You going to live like a sharpie off your luck? Or would you maybe consider supporting yourself like the rest of us dumb mortals do? There's a job at the market for you when you're up out of bed."
From a man's life, to a child's heartbreakingly candid view of the world, Philip Roth has been telling his story. But American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain and now The Plot Against America is his country's story, albeit a blacker, angrier one than that told by John Updike's Rabbit saga. In common with Updike and Saul Bellow, Roth is an American master - if one whose urgency is fuelled by real anger. Reading a novel such as this serves to demonstrate how outstanding the best of US fiction can be and how banal and bloodless contemporary British fiction is.
Read the best of Roth, and here is a further instalment, and then wonder at the tiny complacency of, Tóibín aside, this year's Booker shortlist. More than ever,Philip Roth, one-time maverick self-dramatist turned profound artist of memory, articulates the dilemma that has made art out of his life's journey; to be a Jew is to remember, to be merely American is to forget, therefore being a Jewish-American writer presents the ultimate crisis; trapped between wanting to forget and needing to remember and the increasingly magisterial Roth, magnificently sustained by tears and outraged laughter, has forgotten nothing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Plot Against America By Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, 391pp. £16.99
