Library books:
Let's do something awful.

I can't really write about Philip Roth, given that everyone else has already done so and I don't have much to add. I will say that I love him, I feel oppressed by him, and he disappoints me, but only because I love him so. I feel about him the same way I feel about Martin Amis: I can't believe how funny they are, but they're such grizzled old clueless sexists it's kind of often not worth dealing with them (the eventual death of all of such men [Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, etc.] will feel really liberating, but I'll be pretty old and oppressive myself by the time that happens). As Roth and Amis slip into their dotage they get goofier and goofier (Exit Ghost? The Second Plane?), but at least P.R. has the excuse of being 75 and merely out of it, while crazytalk M.A. is only 57 and truly a paranoid nut. Oh, and they're both come across as really afraid of people in a way that makes them seem way too cosseted by their privilege and fame, but while M.A. is afraid of all poor and/or non-white people (he hasn't been afraid of Americans for decades), P.R. seems mainly afraid of his fans, which is more interesting. Also, obviously Roth is not as cold and soulless as Amis, but also maybe not as nimble. Or maybe he is -- he's clearly the better writer.

So: the Plot Against America. I love that line, "Let's do something awful." It's what the narrator's friend would say before doing some devious deed, like looking in his mother's underwear drawer. I feel like Portnoy's Complaint could have begun with that line. It suggests such a dirty, sneaky, totally controlled rebellion -- completely Rothlike.

In the novel Nazi-sympathizing anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. Around the time I read it Lindbergh's daughter Reeve published a book about, among other things, Lindbergh's three secret German families, which included seven children. Who knew? Apparently lots of people, but I was scandalized. Let's do something awful indeed.