I began Operation Shylock immediately after Portnoy's Complaint and closed it after maybe three paragraphs. I liked The Human Stain and American Pastoral (though less, and I confuse it with E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, because both were audio and one followed the other hard on its little digital heels) and I had to read The Plot Against America for bookclub and I only wanted to write run-on sentences, not to consume so much Roth in such a short period, as my mother-in-law did on lobster, as to become allergic. Perhaps I am too old, and born too late, to have liked Portnoy. Perhaps I prefer Portnoy to be a woodchuck.
This novel's protagonist parallels Roth in a few major ways, as much can happen in whose world Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940 can be--named Philip Roth, born in Newark in 1933, a second child--and also Portnoy, also a second child in Newark whose father is the sole Jewish insurance agent in a gentile office. I don't mind Nathan Zuckerman as an alter ego, but Alexander Portnoy made hair grow on my palms--instead of my usual teeth itching--and Plot's boy Philip Roth resembles Alexander Portnoy more than I would have preferred.
Other than that, I liked most of the book okay. Everything about how Lindberg was elected, the neighborhood and family's reactions to his election, Alvin going off to fight with Canada (pulling a Hemingway, though perhaps I shouldn't use the verb "pull" this close to Portnoy's name) when Lindbergh kept the U.S.A. out of WWII, and Walter Winchell, all of that worked. But I think Roth chickened out of staying in his alternate history, so the last bit of the book fell apart. Spoiler: When someone ceases to be president, her vice-president becomes president and stays that way even if he sucks, until he's impeached, because there's this thing called the Constitution. You can't shove FDR back on the throne just because the people want him, as Roth did, because if the veep is impeached, there's still the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Cabinet and probably the last postal employee before a private citizen can be propped up there.
That said, the novel certainly works as a response to the current zeitgeist.