In The Plot, Roth doesn't just recreate his boyhood landscape, as he has so often before, but renders it as an alternate universe—a bizarro Newark, where reactionary forces have prevailed and Jews live in fear. Although with its historical focus The Plot Against America resembles the books in Roth's recent "American trilogy" (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain), he isn't writing this time in the voice of his longtime alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, or for that matter as any other safely fictional narrator. In The Plot he writes as simply "Philip Roth" of Newark, New Jersey, who lives on Summit Avenue, who has an older brother Sandy, whose father, Herman, sold insurance for Metropolitan Life—all just as in the author's (non-fiction) memoir, The Facts. Then again, as he showed in his novels Operation Shylock and Deception, "Philip Roth" is perhaps his craftiest literary invention.