"It's 1940, and America has just elected an anti-Semitic celebrity president who tacitly allies with the Nazis and pushes the country towards fascism. Drawing on historical fact and his own experience growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth's brilliant, dark but humane satire seemed slightly fanciful when it was first published in 2004. It doesn't anymore."
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 2005-09-27
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Sean S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781400079490
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
