Newark, 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground
By Michiko Kakutani

Published: New York Times, October 4, 2010

NEMESIS

By Philip Roth
280 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

 Philip Roth’s latest protagonist is not one of his self-conscious writer-heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Peter Tarnopol, who spend their lives turning sentences around and contemplating the equation between life and art. No, he’s a simple Newark gym teacher who in the summer of 1944 is supervising the neighborhood playground, watching the boys play ball and the girls jump rope. In Mr. Roth’s new novel, “Nemesis,” it’s the summer when a polio epidemic sweeps through the city, spreading anxiety and suspicion.

 “Nemesis” is a modest undertaking: a small-scale portrait of an era and of an earnest young man who finds the unstoppable engine of history steamrolling over his life. In this case, Bucky Cantor, 23, is one of the neighborhood’s few young men who aren’t off fighting the war; although he wanted to enlist along with his two best friends, he was rejected by all the services because of his terrible eyesight. The sense of duty instilled in him by his grandfather has made him feel guilty about not being able to serve his country. He feels “ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies.”

Still, as Mr. Roth’s narrator recalls, Bucky is venerated by the neighborhood boys as “the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both.” The boys admire Bucky’s athletic skills, and they look up to him as a role model — especially after he faces down a gang of menacing teenagers.

Bucky resembles Marcus, the hero of “Indignation,” in that he’s the very paradigm of niceness. He is not torn, as so many Roth heroes famously are, between responsibility and transgression, tradition and rebellion. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor — doesn’t engage in irony or sarcasm, and rarely speaks in jest. Whereas “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an outrageously comic tale about the throwing off of duty, “Nemesis” is a pleasantly told parable about the embrace of conscience — and what its suffocating, life-denying consequences can be.

Full review at NYT.