David Simon is adapting Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America for television, both the novelist and the creator of The Wire said on Monday.
Shortly after the six-part mini-series was mentioned in an interview with Roth published in the New York Times, Simon confirmed the news on Twitter.
“Not actually cool to be reminded by the paper of record that you are tasked with doing justice to greater work than any on which you have so far trespassed,” Simon said. “Asshole now officially clenched.”
Roth’s 2004 novel depicts an alternative America in which the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. In the novel, Lindbergh signs a treaty with Nazi Germany and antisemitism increases, culminating in a law that relocates Jewish families. The story is told from the perspective of one such Jewish family, increasingly divided and alienated by politics.
The real Lindbergh was a member of the isolationist America First Committee. Donald Trump’s use of “America First” as a campaign slogan prompted many observers to draw comparisons with events depicted in The Plot Against America.
Roth has repeatedly disputed such comparisons.
“It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump,” Roth said.
Speaking to the New York Times, Roth explained that Lindbergh, who flew the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic, was an established American hero before the events in his novel.
“Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac,” Roth said.
Further details on the series were not immediately available, but Roth met recently with Simon.
In April 2017, Simon hinted that he was adapting the series in an interview with Zócalo Public Square. Simon said: “I’m re-reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it would seem because of Trump, but actually I’m engaged in some early discussions about trying to do that for a mini-series.”
The series would be the second alternate-history novel to become televised in recent years, after Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, based on a Philip K Dick novel that depicts a fictional America in the wake of defeat in the second world war.
