Nemesis ~ Philip Roth

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.  

At the centre of Nemesis is 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. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful 23 year-old playground director, 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 – the story 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. Roth does an utterly convincing job of evoking the terror that polio creates over the frightened and bewildered Newark community. (The vaccine was licensed in 1962.) The powerlessness of parents, the desperate lack of information, the speed and severity of the disease are all conveyed with affecting veracity as – seemingly at random – polio sentences child after child to crippling or to death.

"How," thinks Cantor at the funeral of one of the boys from the playground, "could there be forgiveness – let alone hallelujahs – in the face of such lunatic cruelty?" Moving between the smouldering, 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. Nemesis is not really about Cantor's war with polio but his war with himself: the war between a man's idea of duty and decency and the shirking of this for the facilitation of his more immediate happiness.

When Cantor abandons his post at the polio-riddled playground for the mountain summer camp where his fiancee Marcia is working, his conscience is savagely infected by the idea that he has not done the honourable thing. In the end, things get so bad physically and spiritually for Cantor that "the only way to save a remnant of his honour was in denying himself everything he had ever wanted for himself." This is the true emotional core of the novel. And this is the subject, above all others, that most galvanises Roth's genius: a man divided against himself.

Nemesis is Roth's 32nd book.

(From the web)

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