There it settled alongside a nonfiction list that, two weeks before the 2004 election, was dominated by Bush’s presidency. The Plot Against America was his first novel to land on the bestseller list in 17 years. Roth’s dissimulation was not only a canny literary tactic it was also a canny marketing tactic. It didn’t help to clarify his motives that he finished the essay by ridiculing Bush as “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one.” He insisted that he had not intended the novel to be political allegory, while knowing full well that it would be taken as such.

“Literature,” shrugged Roth, “is put to all kinds of uses.” Roth, in other words, was trying to have it both ways. “That would be a mistake.” Yet in the next paragraph Roth recalled the example of Franz Kafka, whose novels were used for political ends that Kafka could never have anticipated. “Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman a clef to the present moment in America,” he wrote in a long essay disputing this interpretation in the New York Times. Even before The Plot Against America was published, Philip Roth felt obliged to deny reports that his new novel was an allegorical indictment of George W.

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