Late style, Edward Said wrote in an essay published shortly before his death, “has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without realising the contradictions between them”. Philip Roth’s new novel, a counter-factual satire in which the pioneering aviator Charles A Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and begins to turn America, as an ally of Nazi Germany and Japan, into a quasi-fascist state, is an exercise in disenchantment and pleasure. In style and tone, it is recognisably the work of a novelist entering the final period of his writing career, peering back through the smoke of a long, fractious but absolutely dedicated life at the person he once was. The novel is unashamedly nostalgic — and this is the great pleasure of it, for both writer and reader.
Roth returns once more to the mercantile neighbourhood of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. This time we follow him directly into the family home as, in an act of imaginative reclamation, he introduces us to his father, Herman, an insurance agent for Metropolitan Life, his resilient mother, Bess, and his elder brother, Sandy. The domestic detail of Roth’s own lower-middle-class, war-shadowed childhood is rendered exactly in clear, plain prose. But the historical circumstances are different — and this is the true disenchantment of the novel because, as the narrator (the young Philip Roth) tells us at the outset, a “perpetual fear” presides over these memoirs. That fear is anti-Semitism, and the precariousness of life for a minority people persecuted and menaced by their own government.
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