On Philip Roth’s ‘Plot’& Sameer Rahim, a comment by American Writer

The Plot Against America: the usual shopworn obsessions with Roth! Narcissism takes the lead in this utterly tepid anti-fascist tract, that features the very appealing narrator/hero: Mr. Roth as a child. Lindbergh is a featured player, but strategically always just off stage, the éminence grise, the villain of this appealing melodrama, marinated in Mr. Roth’s rampant retrospective paranoia . But it never emancipates itself from that melodrama, it would have been more appropriate as a T.V. movie. with Roth providing a self-congratulatory introduction.
Lindbergh was an actual hero, the antithesis of the clownish fascist Ring Master Trump. Lindbergh and America First disappeared after December 7th.
Portnoy’s Complaint was a comic tour de force, as yet to be matched by Roth. Portnoy and Myra Breckenridge were the scandalous satirical literary polemics of the late 60’s in America.
American Writer

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/sameer-rahim/what-philip-roth-can-teach-us-about-donald-trump

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About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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