num_pages: 280
description: In the stifling heat of equatorial Newark a terrifying epidemic is raging threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming paralysis lifelong disability and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roths 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 center of Nemesis is a vigorous dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director Bucky Cantor a javelin thrower and 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 Cantors dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playgroundand on the everyday realities he facesRoth 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 smoldering malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill a pristine childrens summer camp high in the Poconoswhose mountain air was purified of all contaminantsRoth 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 Cantors passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roths late short novels Everyman Indignation The Humbling and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?
language: English
title: Nemesis
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt