Nemesis

Nemesis

Well into his old age, the late Philip Roth (1932 -- May 22,2018) continued to write short, perceptive novels about death, the fragility of life at any age, and the difficulty of choice in a world of apparent chance. Roth's most recent novel, "Nemesis" has as its main character a likeable, athletic physical education teacher, Eugene "Bucky" Cantor whose story ends unhappily due to accidents, his own conscientiousness, and some questionable decisions. The book is set in Newark, New Jersey of 1944, particularly in the city's Jewish community. This is a location Roth knows intimately, and he describes it in this book with a feeling of nostalgia. Roth describes a polio epidemic during the summer at a time when Bucky was working as a playground director. The narrator of the story is, for a time, left ambiguous. Hints in the first sentence and elsewhere show that the book does not have an outside, "omnisicent" narrator. But only in the final section of the novel is it made clear that the narrator was a young boy of 12, Arnie Mesnikoff, when he contacted polio in 1944 on Bucky's playground. Bucky also becomes a victim of polio. When the two men meet in Newark in the early 1970's, Bucky tells Arnie his story, recounted in the novel.

Bucky's mother died in childbirth and his father was a small-time criminal who abandoned the boy. Thus Bucky was raised by his maternal grandparents who loved the child but made him feel insecure due to his perceived lack of a real "family". To Bucky's regret, he is rejected for service in WW II due to his poor vision, but he is otherwise physically tough and an excellent athlete. He becomes a physical education teacher with the laudable if limited goal of becoming the head of the physical education program at a Newark high school some day.

During the first part of the book, Bucky struggles diligently with the increasingly severe polio epidemic during his work as a playground director. But the heat, the tension, the feelings of responsibility, and the calls of Bucky's girlfriend, Miriam, who is working at a summer camp in the Pennsylvania Poconos prove too much. With a feeling of guilt, Bucky leaves the playground to work as the director of swimming at the camp, when the earlier director gets drafted. At the camp, Bucky has the opportunity for a physical relationship with Miriam which had heretofore been rare. Bucky also hopes to escape from the scourge of polio, but this is not to be. Bucky feels he is responsible for transporting the polio from Newark to the camp. He blames himself and he blames God. Never an observant Jew, Bucky never brings himself to question God's existence. He concludes that God allows the polio epidemic and other inexplicable human sufferings to take place and is evil, not worthy of worship.

Bucky never comes to terms with the polio which cripples him and which kills or cripples many others. He also regrets his inability to serve in the military, where a dear friend dies during the invasion of France, and his decision to leave Newark in the midst of the epidemic. Most importantly, he regrets the denouement of his relationship to Miriam after he contacts polio. The reader meets him late in life, sad and alone with no hopes and with little understanding of himself or of his peculiar theology.

The book features a portrayal of Newark in the 1940's and the early 1970s together with an appreciation of the hard-working and essentially decent Jewish community of Roth's own youth. Roth's own outlook on the questions raised in the book remains, I think, uncompromisingly secular. The novel is a poignant tale of a young man with many strengths who, for all his virtues, is unable to respond adequately to the difficult chances with which he is faced. "Nemesis" is an eloquent late work of a major American writer.

Robin Friedman