The Plot Against...What?
As regards Philip Roth's 'The Plot Against America' I find it confusing and self-indulgent for the writer to create an 'alternate history' as part of their work. Not only does it render the narrator unreliable and his opinion irrelevant but it also calls the reader's entire social consciousness into question. If an important historical truth is disregarded, surely our entire perceptions of history and morality are also changed, leaving the reader feeling completely disorientated and excluded from the story.
It's interesting to consider how history rests on certain pivotal moments: assassinations, elections, war declarations, coup d'états. But taking this "What If" approach to history seems like a grave insult to our understanding of both modern and historical society. A much stronger, more thought-provoking and progressive way to challenge our assumptions about society is surely to set this 'other' social scene in the future, thereby presenting far more of a sense of possibility and also leaving the reader's interpretations of the past untouched. It was not the wildly unfamiliar setting that I have problems appreciating, just the blatant impossibility of the situation.
My dad said he had heard a BBC radio drama in which Hitler had successfully occupied Britain during World War Two, the effect being to demonstrate that although the French leaders collaborated and betrayed their citizens, the British would have behaved just as atrociously under occupation. There does seem to be something powerful about this scenario, so perhaps what makes Roth's novel so misleading and self-absorbed is that he tells it as though it is his autobiography, using his own family's names and places, and probably manipulating real events that took place, but flippantly altering historical events for his literary convenience. After a while I found myself groaning in disbelief, as factual biographical details were intertwined with fictional nonsense. If this book is an account of the author's childhood, surely the creation of an fantasy alternate history is directly contradictory to the nature of his writing?
