Philip Roth’s re-imagining of history reminds me of the old What If? comic books, wherein they take a specific point in history and change an event or the choice someone makes. The narrative then follows this alternate reality to demonstrate how different the world would have become. It’s like Clarence the angel in It’s A Wonderful Life when he shows George how different his entire town would be had he never been born.

But in The Plot Against America, Roth chooses to ask What if Charles Lindbergh had run in the 1940 presidential election and defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Lindbergh was in real life an anti-semite and Nazi sympathizer, and so Roth chooses to study the impact such a world altering event would have on a single Jewish family in Newark, which is presumably closely patterned after his own—since he names his protagonist, a 7-year old boy, Philip Roth.

I really liked the pervasive feeling of creepiness woven into the first two-thirds of the book, where there’s no outright evidence of anything but a presidency trying to keep its country out of war. But under the guise of emphasizing Americanness, government programs slowly start to attack the solidarity of predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, as large companies cooperate with a redistribution plan. It all starts to feel very nefarious, and eventually a tipping point is reached.

The only real problem I had with it was the end, which seemed much more improbable, as it managed to set everything back to roughly the way it would have been had Lindbergh not won the election. I’d have been far more interested in finding out what the rest of the 20th century would have been like if, for instance, the United States had joined the Axis and fought Canada.