“Something That Has Already Happened”: Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America recapitulates the history of mid-twentieth-century American race relations, and the novel’s repudiation of these assimilationist events makes it the most multicultural of his novels. But in raising the specter of one model of Jewish difference (racial) only to replace it with another (cultural), Roth is blind to the animating model (religious) of the contemporary period’s conservative Christian resurgence. Widely read as being a critical response to that resurgence, the novel’s evacuation of religious meaning suggests how poorly prepared Roth was to tackle the religious energy that overtook the nation during his long career.