The Plot Against America
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin. 400 pages. $36.95.

Philip Roth can write anything. And he can write it very well. He’s an unparalleled humorist in Portnoy’s Complaint, The Great American Novel and My Life as a Man, displaying comic exuberance that is the literary equivalent of Woody Allen channelling the Marx Brothers. He’s also a moral historian. His finest portraits of American life — Goodbye, Columbus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral and The Human Stain — capture the sounds, stories and ideologies of the 1950s, ’70s and ’90s with striking precision.

And in yet another set of novels, Roth is a master fabulist who delights in telling tales that are deliberately and disturbingly unreal. The Ghostwriter contains a haunting fantasy about Anne Frank riding out the Second World War in her cramped bunker and appearing, years later, in rural Massachusetts. What if, Roth asks, Anne hadn’t perished? Who would she have become? The Counterlife presents five mutually exclusive iterations of the lives of its characters, and Operation Shylock introduces a doppelganger Roth who advocates the transfer of Israeli Jews back to Eastern Europe. Spinning out these unbelievable stories, Roth exhibits fiction’s power to reveal truth without being true. He tells it like it is by telling it like it ain’t. (more…)