Set in Newark, New Jersey, both the book and series show the triumph of famous aviator and America First-er Lindbergh over Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and the country’s subsequent descent into isolationism and rampant anti-Semitism, through the eyes of one Jewish family: Beth and Herman; their young boys, Philip and Sandy; Alvin, Herman’s adult nephew; and Evelyn, Beth’s sister, as well as her paramour, the Lindbergh-admiring Rabbi Bengelsdorf. As the country fractures around the new president, so too does the family: Alvin enlists in the Canadian Army to fight Nazis; Sandy, at odds with his father’s anger and New Deal socialism, retreats into himself; Evelyn, dazzled by the smooth-talking Bengelsdorf and his connections to the president’s inner circle, drifts ever rightwards. 

The Plot Against America is old-fashioned television with newfangled production values. Earnest and slow moving, it has virtually no libidinal charge whatsoever (unlike most of HBO’s other marquee shows, there’s nary an exposed female breast in sight). And while it replicates the book’s attention to detail, transmuting Roth’s long, accumulating sentences, into fluid, Steadicam-heavy cinematography, it largely jettisons its comic tone. For the most part, the series is textural rather than dramatic, foregrounding mood – namely, a sort of creeping dread – over incident. It’s also beautiful to behold. Cinematographer Martin Ahlgren’s recreation of 1940s America – clearly influenced by Edward Hopper and his fellow mid-twentieth-century realists – is meticulous and warm-hued.   

Morgan Spector and Zoe Kazan in The Plot Against America (photograph via HBO)

Much has been made of Winona Ryder’s performance as Evelyn, but it’s nothing special. Nor is Morgan Spector’s Herman. Square-jawed and handsome, he convinces as a leading man but not the everyman Roth, I suspect, had in mind. Far better, though likely to be underappreciated on account of its restraint, is Zoe Kazan’s Beth, strong not in the modern, ‘kick-ass’ sense of the word, but in a way that feels almost lost to contemporary film- and TV-making. She is resilient and quietly forceful, a woman whose innate power is utterly compromised by the restrictive gender roles of the time. The child actors are terrific, especially Azhy Robertson as Roth’s ten-year-old surrogate, Philip (the Roths are renamed Levins for the series, and the book’s retrospective first-person narration by an older Philip has been dropped). John Turturro, one of America’s best character actors, is ideally cast as the buttery, southern-accented Bengelsdorf.

Prior to his death in 2018, Roth apparently cautioned Simon not to draw too close a parallel between Lindbergh and Trump. For one, Lindbergh was a popular hero prior to his embrace of Nazism; Trump was never anything except a shonky businessman and TV host – a putz, as Herman might put it. But, just as the novel in its day was read by many as a roman-à-clef for the warmongering administration of George W. Bush, it is inevitable that the series will be widely interpreted as an allegory for Trump’s rise to power, and the poisoning of the American body politic by his alternately tacit and overt endorsements of xenophobia, racism, and bigotry.

Whether Simon heeded Roth’s advice is unclear. The series is peppered with dialogue ostensibly about Lindbergh, but that takes little imagination to hear as a projection aimed squarely at the incumbent president. He doesn’t mean what he says he means. There’s a lot of hate out there, which he knows how to tap into. As Herman says, ‘That man is unfit. He shouldn’t be the president. It’s as simple as that.’

Like any good writer, Roth feared the reduction of his novel into an easy parable for any one historical moment. But why make the series now, more than a decade after the book’s publication, if not out of a sense of urgency to arrest the Trump presidency before a bewildered and betrayed portion of the electorate, and an embarrassingly ineffectual Democratic Party, conspire to guarantee for it a second term come November?

Trump is not a fascist; to say so is a category error that diminishes both our understanding of fascism and of the man himself. He’s something far slipperier than that – a self-aggrandising huckster, a narcissistic crybaby, a demagogue by accident rather than design, and, yes, a kind of America First-er – which makes him harder to mobilise against. This is where the comparison to Lindbergh, at least the maverick figure of Roth’s imagination, is useful. It reminds us that we should be worried less about the importation of European-style fascism into America (à la Philip K. Dicks’s The Man in the High Castle, also recently adapted for television) than about the gradual exclusion of minorities from the American Dream – what is left of it – by the deeply regressive tendencies of what now passes for mainstream conservatism.  

Much as we might wish it, it is unlikely that Trump will disappear in a puff of smoke as the Lindbergh of The Plot Against America does, lost in a conspiracy theory-stoking plane flight. Instead, we will have to do what Philip Roth, and this adaptation of his book, doesn’t: reckon with a time not safely exorcised of state-sanctioned hate but pregnant with it.

The Plot Against America is available on HBO.