The Plot Against America

Roth does this thing in The Plot Against America where instead of building up to a major dramatic climax where everything hits the fan at once and turns into holy-shit-chaos like in American Pastoral, he rather casually introduces startling little facts and effects upfront and explains them later which results in tiny little chaos slaps in the face.  Something along the lines of "I snuck out of my house to become an orphan and everything really turned out fine and I don't even remember getting kicked by that horse and why I'm now hooked up to a tube"...which then goes on to explain how he came upon a horse and why it decided to kick him in the head.  In better words, of course.  The overall story though, is a what-if-Lindy-had-been-president-instead-of-FDR fictionalized history told through the accounts of Philip Roth as a young boy in New Jersey.  This means that America grows to be an anti-semitic nation led by a supposed supporter of Hitler.  I've never really read/seen anything about America's involvement with WWII prior to Pearl Harbor, so this was an interesting place to start.

I'm really impressed by the way Philip Roth can complexly think things through and write in such a detailed manner pertaining to various characters, and how things affect one another.  I'm a simpleton so I'm unable to conceptualize one person's actions and motives and how they will build into a bunch of other events and thus my stories are flatter than this rich faux history that Roth has created.  It's believable, exciting, and personal, and you get the sense that you're actually learning something about history even though it's not what really happened (although, you can get a quick taste of the learning bit of real events from the postscript).  As I've mentioned before, I've often found that Jewish writers are exceptional at capturing emotion beautifully (whether it's Nazi-related or not), and by using his own family as the centerpiece of the story, Roth has written a sort of upside-down fairy tale of his own life that is relatable.

All this WWII reading led me to other movies and online reading and now I'm kind of paranoid, though I'm not sure of what.  Also, I didn't know Henry Ford was such an anti-semite.  What an asshole.

Going to Boston next weeeeeeek!  Dear god, let someone freaking hire me soon because this job hunt thing is really getting expensive.