In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is
raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming,
paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and
surprising theme of 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 centre of Nemesis is a vigorous,
dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin
thrower and a 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 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. 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 question that
haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The
Humbling, and now, Nemesis- what choices fatally shape a life? How
powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?