Philip Roth examines 1940s polio epidemic in new novel
Review from The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
In the summer of 1944, while America was fighting around the world, it was waging another war at home, as a polio epidemic swept the country. In "Nemesis," Philip Roth once again takes us back to Newark, as polio physically and emotionally cripples the lives of its residents.
Beginning with "American Pastoral" (1997), Roth's journeys back to his native city have become increasingly elegiac, recalling a lost world of hardworking, ethnically homogeneous enclaves in which, as the narrator states in "Nemesis," "each knew the job to do and how best to do it."
In the opening pages of "Nemesis," the embodiment of that seemingly stable world is Eugene "Bucky" Cantor, a handsome and athletic 23-year-old playground director who has been forced to sit out the war because of poor eyesight.
Bucky's charges - some the same age as the 11-year-old Roth would have been in 1944 - think he can do no wrong. Arnie Mesnikoff, who narrates "Nemesis," is one of them.
"He seemed to us invincible," Arnie recalls, not only as a gifted athlete, but also as a man who is consistently courageous and levelheaded, whether he is staring down hoodlums intent on "spreading polio" among Bucky's fellow Jews or is persuading his boys to stay calm as polio claims its first victims.
But however superhuman he may seem to be, Bucky can't stop polio - or panic - from spreading. As he did in two other recent novels - "The Plot Against America" (2004) and "Indignation" (2008) - Roth vividly re-creates how "fear degrades us," as we deny the best of who we are by searching for scapegoats to explain what we can't understand or won't accept.
As was also true in "The Plot Against America," Roth makes much of this sound funny - at least until it isn't.
"Nemesis" describes anti-polio measures that include efforts to exterminate stray cats while leaving domestic cats alone, the mayor's "swat the fly" campaign," and neighborhood speculation that one victim had "caught" polio from eating a hot dog at the local dive.
But as Roth knows, no mention of extermination in 1944 can be entirely innocent - any more than we can blithely pass over the ensuing call for a quarantine of Newark's Jewish section that would "pen people in."
By the time Newark is debating quarantine, even Bucky has lost his bearings. Worn down by parents blaming his playground activities for their kids' polio, he follows other Roth protagonists out of town and into the country, with similarly disastrous results.
Bucky's rural tour of duty involves joining his fiancée as a staff member at a Jewish children's camp in rural Pennsylvania, which promises cooler temperatures and a fresh start.
This Pennsylvania interlude is the weakest part of the book, done in by meandering descriptions of camp rituals and Roth's lifeless account of the relationship between Bucky and his betrothed.
But in ways I can't divulge, Bucky's trip to the woods also prepares us for the hard lesson at the core of Roth's late work, including each of the four recent novels Roth now is grouping as "Nemesis" novels: Because you can't run from the fate that awaits you, you better learn how to make peace with it.
Bucky never does, and in the magnificent 40-page section that concludes "Nemesis," Roth moves us forward to 1971 and tries to explain why.
A husk of his former self, the 50-year-old Bucky rails against God and against himself, holding both responsible for the kids who died, while turning his back on a world in which they could and did.
Roth is having none of it.
Like the protagonists in the other three "Nemesis" novels, Bucky showcases a possible version of who Roth himself might have become, had he not learned to balance an often heroic resistance to all limits with the humbling recognition that nobody - not even one of our greatest and most daring living writers - can outwit fate forever.
