In his essay ‘The Story Behind ‘The Plot’ in this week’s NYT Book Review, Philip Roth says that he did not write The Plot Against America with today’s political climate in mind.

“Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman à clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake. I set out to do exactly what I’ve done: reconstruct the years 1940-42 as they might have been if Lindbergh, instead of Roosevelt, had been elected president in the 1940 election. I am not pretending to be interested in those two years—I am interested in those two years.”

I read The Plot Against American a few weeks ago and loved it, but I couldn’t help but make the connection to today even if he didn’t intend to make it. Roth’s essay is definitely worth reading. He tells how he crafted his latest novel from its conception to crafting the characters. Plus at the end, he goes off on how unpredictable the world is. “And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy.” How awesome is that?
Also, as other have already pointed out, check out this lengthy interview with Roth at the Guardian. He’s a fascinating man.