The Plot Against America

What if Charles Lindbergh — aviator hero, open antisemite, America First isolationist — had won the 1940 presidential election instead of Roosevelt? Roth answers this through the Roth family of Newark, New Jersey: his own family, fictionalized, watching their country change around them in ways that are incremental enough to accommodate and devastating enough to destroy. The genius of the novel is its ordinariness — not the camps and the roundups but the dinner table arguments, the neighborhood gossip, the cousin who decides to collaborate, the slow realization that the country you loved has decided you are not fully part of it. Published in 2004, it has aged into something closer to prophecy than fiction.