PHILIP ROTH’S OUTPUT in his majestic late phase can be crudely divided into novels about geriatric sex set in the near-present (Sabbath’s Theater, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal) and novels about history. The latter tend to zoom in on periods of national division, and – after revisiting the 1960s in American Pastoral and the McCarthy era in I Married a Communist – Roth now turns his attention to the years just before the US entered the Second World War, when Franklin Roosevelt faced opposition from isolationists who were determined to keep the country out of a conflict between European states.

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