American Carnage

American Carnage looks at Philip Roth’s historical fiction as a creative lens for reading the distortional reality of Donald Trump’s America.

American Carnage: Reading Philip Roth in the Age of Donald Trump looks at Roth’s historical fiction (The Plot Against America, The Human Stain, and Nemesis) as a creative lens for the distorted reality of Donald Trump’s America. It argues that Roth’s counterfactual reimagining of the past challenges the post-historical credo of a neoliberal political order that has brought considerable disrepair to American democracy, leaving it vulnerable to the reactionary barbs and populist imagery of Trump. Though Roth stopped publishing in 2010, his fiction grapples with key issues defining the current political havoc. In a post-Cold War age defined by triumphal declarations about the end of history, Andy Connolly explores Roth’s creative focus on the ghostly and ghastly return of history from beneath the two-dimensional facade of political and social life. Roth’s fixation with the restive pull of the past on this seemingly self-generated, post-modernized present, set loose from the gravitational elements of social life, allows for an interesting way of reading the peculiar conditions that gave birth to, and which continue to energize, the bizarre politics of Trump. Reading Philip Roth as a way of illuminating the twisted chain of causalities and symptoms that give such odd shape to the Trump-dominated present, American Carnage looks further at how Roth’s exploration of the unstable past hints towards a possible future re-opening of the historical imagination.