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In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roth’s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor’s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground—and on the everyday realities he faces—Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children’s summer camp high in the Poconos—whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants"—Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood.
Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roth’s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?
With Nemesis Roth leaps back again, to Newark in 1944, in the summer, polio season -- but this year, the worst outbreak of polio in a lifetime, and long before there was even a glimpse of a vaccine. The fact of the eradication of polio, an affliction unknown in the lifetime of most Americans now, only makes Roth's recreation of the disease all but horror-movie immediate: unstoppable, unpredictable, unknowable, evading diagnosis until it is too late, with cases spreading through a neighborhood by the hour and children dead overnight or consigned to an iron lung for the rest of their lives (and what is an iron lung, any reader might have to ask, only to find out, and then be horrified at how polio could redefine everyday life?).
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Melissa Palumbo
reviewed Nemesis on June 25, 2014 Nemesis
I have been thinking about what makes some books stay in my memory...
... even long after I returned them to a library in a town from which I moved away some ten years ago? And why others just fade away to the extent that I could possibly read them again without ever recognising that I have actually met the characters before? Or to the extent that I buy a new copy because I have forgotten I own one already?
Philip Roth's "Nemesis" is one of those books I remember with force after ten years, and I know why as well. The topic is heartbreaking, and very realistic: a polio epidemic in the 1940s, and how it affects the characters over the course of their lives. As such, it is nothing out of the ordinary, just well-written, good, vintage Philip Roth.
But when I come to the last page, the book closes the circle of the story with - yes! - a memory of the main character from before the the epidemic, and it evokes this picture in me of all the hopes, dreams, ideas we have when we are young, when our life is still a novel to be written by us, and we imagine it to be a heroic tale with a happy beginning, middle and end (although we don't think of the end, of course, and of the fact that the novel would be outrageously bad, from a literary standpoint!).
The main character's early memory, dating before the tragedy unfolds, is of powerful vitality, and it emphasises the impact of the main theme of the later plot, - both physical and mental loss. It is so incredibly sad to read about the young person the main character remembers, and to imagine what comes afterwards, - his failure to cope with the realities of life, his Nemesis, as the title of the novel indicates, referring to ancient Greek drama, where heroes were first put on stage to act out our ideal of a perfect life.
In fact, that very last sentence of the book has more than one reference to ancient Greek idealism, as it shows the Olympic, athletic act of throwing a javelin, carried out by a body not yet destroyed by polio. It demonstrates the treacherous belief in humankind's perfectibility that so often is followed by Nemesis' entrance on the stage:
"Running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder ' and releasing it then like an explosion ' he seemed to us invincible."
The novel closes on that word: invincible... - a sad counterweight to the story of defeat.
Invincible, invincible, invincible - that is what made me remember this novel so clearly.
It is like the slave standing behind the almighty emperor whispering "Memento mori". And yet, the memory of that moment of invincibility is beautiful!
And it made the novel memorable as well. The power of words to conjure up dreams...
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