I liked Roth's style, which was eminently readable; I'd even describe the novel as a page-turner. The book's premise is fascinating: an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 to become president of the United States and came to an accommodation with the Nazis. I also rather liked Roth's central narrative conceit. The book is written as if it were a memoir of an alternate Philip Roth looking back at his experiences from age seven to nine years old, covering the time from Lindbergh's nomination for president to October of 1942. There's a wealth of evocative (if sometimes twisted) historical detail used to ground Roth's vision and some really nice touches, such as having Lindbergh campaign by barnstorming America. That's enough to earn it that star and a half.
The problem is the workings of Roth's plot, his characterizations of historic Republican politicians and of the anti-war movement reminds me far too much of loony leftist fantasists like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone. Maybe the title should have warned me. Given some of the descriptions of the "laconic" Lindbergh, his mastermind vice-president Wheeler and the publication date of 2004, I suspect we were supposed to see George W Bush and Dick Cheney in his depiction.
But there's a rather savage irony here. The most sinister governmental act in Roth's tale is the forced relocation of 245 Jewish families to the heartland. Ironic, because in reality, exactly at the time Roth sets this, a far vaster racially motivated forced relocation and internment, of Japanese-Americans, was occurring--enacted by Roth's hero, FDR. An injustice not alluded to in Roth's novel or even his historical "postscript" listing the real FDR's acts. Someone who really wanted to write a powerful indictment of tyranny should have pointed that event up, not ignored it. But that wouldn't have suited Roth's simplistic partisan fable.
