Book Review - Nemesis, by Philip Roth

Another all-day session at the hospital today gave me plenty of time to finish Philip Roth's hot-off-the-presses novel Nemesis. The novel is touted as another of Roth's recent run of shorter novels that deal with dark questions such as "what kind of choices fatally shape a life?" and "How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance."

The book, weighing in at 280 fairly light pages, tells the story of 23 year old Bucky Cantor, a playground director from the Jewish Weequahic section of Newark in 1944. Bucky already has guilt that he isn't fighting alongside his friends in WW2 because of poor eyesight, and things get much worse for him when a terrible polio outbreak begins to decimate Newark, and his neighborhood in particular. He questions his ability to protect the children under his care when more and more are stricken, with some of them dying. Further compounding his issues, he decides to take a job at the summer camp in the Poconos where his fiancee works. Even though the Newark playgrounds are subsequently closed, Bucky is now saddled with yet more guilt in the form of the feeling of having abandoned his neighborhood for the relative safety of the Pennsylvania mountains. When polio puts in an appearance at the summer camp, Bucky sees his failure as complete.

The novel deals with themes of duty, honor, faith and guilt (among others), and was a good solid read, but not great. Roth spends a good deal of time with what I would consider to be a fairly superficial examination of the religious aspect of "why does God let horrible things happen to good people?", but it never really goes anywhere. And the structure of the book is a little odd, where the first 80% or so of the book is told in current time of 1944, and then the last part is told from a completely different perspective of "what happened to Bucky later in life" many years later. The effect of this last part of the book being a separate coda to the book rather than being an organic part of it didn't work well for me.

3.5 stars out of 5. A solid but unspectacular book.

Books read in 2010: 23 [totalling 5,282 pages]
New authors: 14 [unchanged]
Published in 2010: 14 [including this]
Classics: still 3