Nemesis
As Roth nears 80, many of his recent books have dealt with mortality. Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation particularly. Nemesis does as well, though not the mortality of an aged man, but the mortality of the young and vital.
It is 1944, a sweltering summer in Newark. Bucky Cantor, an idealistic young man, teaches gym and has a summer job managing a playground. He has been classified 4-F by the draft board because of bad eyesight, and feels guilty about it, as his good friends are fighting in Europe. He does his job with enthusiasm, caring about the boys who play in the ballgames on his playground.
But a killer is loose. Polio--scary, dangerous, and mysterious, begins to strike. Several boys under Bucky's charge are stricken, and two die. One parent accuses Bucky of letting them play in the heat for too long. No one knows what causes the disease, which makes everyone scared and suspicious.
Bucky's girlfriend has a job as a counselor at a camp in the Poconos. A job opens up there, and against his better judgement, he leaves Newark and goes to the cooler and polio-free climes of Pennsylvania. But then a boy comes down with polio, and Bucky can only blame himself.
Roth beautifully captures the place and period. You can feel the "equatorial" heat of that summer in Newark, which at the time was predominately Jewish and Italian. Roth's old neighborhood of Weequahic is as recognizable to his readers as Yoknapatawpha County is to Faulkner's. No less skillfully detailed is Indian Hill, the summer camp in the Poconos, which is run by a man who believes strongly in the Indian camping methods. I couldn't help but think back to my summer camp in the '70s, when we also were grouped by Indian names. I think I was a Pottowattomie.
I loved Roth's passages on the bucolic camp, such as this one: "The hills, the woods, the white island, even the lake had disappeared. He was alone on the board above the lake and could barely see a thing. The air was warm, his body was warm, and all he could hear was the pock of tennis balls being hit and the occasional clank of metal on metal where some campers off in the distance were pitching horseshoes and striking the stake. And when he breathed in, there was nothing to smell of Secaucus, New Jersey."
There's not as much of the bawdy Roth humor. There's no explicit sex; not a word that would offend a nun (Bucky and his girlfriend have sex, but in the dark on an island in the middle of the lake), but there is a little zing here and there. I laughed at this line, spoken to Bucky by a camper during an Indian ceremony: "'It's our medicine man," whispered Donald. "It's Barry Feinberg.'"
Roth's last three books, which he has grouped together and called "Nemeses: Three Short Novels," all take a central character and basically grind him into dust. There are parallels between Bucky and Marcus Messner, the college boy of Indignation, as both are unraveled by fate, although Messner's flaw is within himself, while Bucky's is set forth by outside influences--namely, polio.
But Roth takes it further in a coda. The story is narrated by one of the boys Bucky managed on the playground, who came down with polio. He meets Bucky later in life, and we see that Bucky's downfall doesn't really come from polio; it comes from his reaction to it. "But there's nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy. He'd been alone for too long with his sense of things--and without all he'd wanted so desperately to have--for me to dislodge his interpretation of his life's terrible event or to shift his relation with it."
In some ways, Nemesis is a retelling of the Book of Job, as Bucky questions a God that would strike down innocent children. But God does not, as he does with Job, appear to Bucky, and he is left alone to deal with the consequences.
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