Nemesis

by Philip Roth

New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.  Pp. 280.

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

This book brought back memories of the lines at my grade school in Minnesota on the day they distributed the polio vaccine.  Unlike that day, offering protection from a wretched disease, Roth’s book is set in pre-vaccination days in the summer of 1944.  In a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey, children start to sicken – and die of polio.

The work’s protagonist, Bucky Cantor, is a playground director in his twenties and witnesses his young charges become ill and the reactions of their playmates and families as he visits the families, attends the funerals and talks with his charges.

One of the more extended descriptions in the novel is the funeral of young Alan at the synagogue.  There is an ageless quality about Roth’s descriptions of grief, confusion and pain in the scene surrounding the occasion.  The author writes of the graveside service:  “They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner’s prayer, praising God’s almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death….better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate.” (74-74).

As the summer draws on Bucky Cantor goes to a children’s summer camp in the Poconos to serve as a counselor.  Removed from the city, supposedly children were considered safe in that environment. As Bucky negotiates a romance with a girlfriend and receives more phone calls from the inner city of polio’s advance, the unthinkable happens.

While the children of a Jewish neighborhood have temporarily escaped to the camp fantasy world of another American minority community, it becomes radically altered as the camp director summons the children one morning and announces:”Donald Kaplow of the Comanche cabin.  Donald …has contracted polio….The counselors and campers were, of course, startled to learn that everything in camp had suddenly changed – that everything in life had changed – and they waited in silence to hear what the doctor would say.” (232)

The final major revelation of the novel awaits the reader.  Roth has produced another measured, quietly agonized, look at a major time in America’s life centered on the tragedy of an untreatable childhood disease.  His work is a reminder that the word ‘epidemic’ perpetually continues to confront humanity with the multiple meanings of life and death.