IN HIS 2004 NOVEL, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines an alternative history issuing from the 1940 defeat of incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the isolationist and America First candidate, Charles Lindbergh. An instance of the genre uchronia, a compound literally meaning “no time,” The Plot Against America supplies in a US setting roughly what Camus’ La Peste did over a generation earlier in a fictional 1940s Algeria: a depiction of human rot inexorably overtaking a previously sane (one is tempted in this connection to say sanitary) society.
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