'Because what's history?' a character asks rhetorically in Philip Roth's astonishing new novel. 'History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue.' And is history also what people are afraid of, even on Summit Avenue? In a material sense it can't be, since we fear, by definition, what hasn't happened yet. If it had happened, to adapt a line of Kafka's about belief in progress, it wouldn't be an object of fear, it would be a source of experience. Yet feelings obviously have their history, and it would be a very thin account of the world that left them out. 'Fear presides over these memories,' The Plot against America begins, 'a perpetual fear.' But over which memories? Those situated in an imagined America or in a real one? Or in both?

LRB 4 November 2004 | PDF Download