Nemesis
Ratings12
Average rating3.2
15
Ratings12
Average rating3.2
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?
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Such an odd little book. I was interested in the subject because my uncle, who died in the '50s, contracted polio as a child in the '20s. And although it's a dark story–finding happiness in a story about polio just wouldn't be real, I suppose–it held my attention. The narrator is a man who, as a boy, contracted polio during an epidemic in Newark New Jersey in 1944 (a fictional epidemic, I gather), but the focus of his tale is Bucky Cantor, then a 23-year-old athlete and playground director who was kept out of the Army because of his eyesight. Any more would spoil the plot, but for most of the book, I was engrossed. Up to a point, Bucky is a sympathetic character, but he makes a bad choice (possibly more than one), and that introduced too much melodrama for me.
Such an interesting exercise to read in May/June 2020, in the midst of COVID19 and #BlackLivesMatter, having just finished [b:For The Love Of Men 43263540 For the Love of Men From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity Liz Plank https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1548887843l/43263540.SY75.jpg 67142358] and its assault on toxic masculinity, having spent the last two years consciously reading books by women of color and twenty years reading and thinking deeply about morality. I think the context detracted from my enjoyment of what might otherwise have been a book I'd enjoy.I found the protagonist unsympathetic, and sharply increasingly so as the book progressed. The setting, unbearably whitemale and then, in Part 2, even depressingly so. The dialog stilted, characters flat. The writing was lovely, I'll admit: beautiful evocative sentences, but there just was no real author's voice until the very end, and then it's crammed into so little space that he comes off as sermonizing.Maybe at twenty I would've found material to ponder. Where I am today, not so much. But I'm a crotchety old man, what do I know about great literature?
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