Portland Public Library

Novels 2001-2007, the dying animal ; The plot against America ; Exit ghost, Philip Roth

eng

Includes bibliographical references (page 677)

no index present

novels

Novels 2001-2007

bibliography

914467291

Philip Roth

The Library of America, 236

the dying animal ; The plot against America ; Exit ghost

The dying animal: Swearing off the drag of married life during the heady days of the 1960s sexual revolution, David Kepesh left his wife and son, choosing instead to reinvent himself in the extistential freedom of an "emancipated manhood." In his 60s, Kepesh conducts an ordered life in New York as a prominent professor and television culture critic. A man of undiluted sexual appetites, his minor celebrity delivers him a fresh new crop of nubile coeds every semester. And then he encounters Consuela. The daughter of wealthy Cuban émigrés, she is volumptuous and beautiful -- and she becomes Kepesh's obsessionThe plot against America: Roth creates a mesmerizing alternate world as well, in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and Philip, his parents and his brother weather the storm in Newark, N.J. Incorporating Lindbergh's actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war, Roth builds an eerily logical narrative that shows how isolationists in and out of government, emboldened by Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism (he invites von Rippentrop to the White House, etc.), enact new laws and create an atmosphere of religious hatred that culminates in nationwide pogromsExit ghost: After 11 years of isolation in his New England mountain refuge, Zuckerman returns to New York City and makes three important connections that threaten his carefully protected sense of isolation