A chilling experiment in speculative fiction,conjures an alternative universe that is just a few frames out of sprocket. In the presidential election of 1940, as war rages in Europe, Charles Lindbergh leverages his heroic backstory to defeat FDR on an isolationist platform . It can happen here and it does: the aviator is a stalking horse for an American Reich. Incited by the White House, the worst impulses of a nativist nation spring to the surface.
Roth, who died in 2018 before the Nobel Prize for Literature committee in Stockholm could come to its senses, harnesses this forgotten chapter in Winchell’s life to set up the central ideological face-off in. The gesture is both an act of historical reclamation and a kind of posthumous rehabilitation for a man not treated kindly in popular memory, when remembered at all.
It should be noted that many of Winchell's jibes at Hitler were infused with the homophobia of the day. Again and again, he insinuated that the exemplary Nazi ubermensch was in fact a "sissy" or "nance." He smirked that the German people might be interested to know "that Hitler uses 23 varieties of perfume — and he still smells bad!" It drove the Nazis crazy.
And then, the unimaginable: on the night of March 1, 1932, the twenty-month-old boy was kidnapped from the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, New Jersey. Ten weeks later, his body was found less than five miles from the house. The tragedy hit Americans like a death in the family. In 1935, when the Lindberghs left the U.S. for England to seek privacy from a ravenous press corps, their countrymen were heartsick, but most understood.
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