Nemesis by Philip Roth

A Book Review by Pamela Sergey

The word “nemesis” is derived from a combination of two Greek words meaning “to give what is due” and distribute” – Nemesis is the goddess of revenge and cosmic balance. Frightening. Roth’s novel conjures up the Greek goddess rather than the more traditional meaning for “nemesis” as a rival one can overcome.

In Roth’s 31st and last novel, published in 2010, the reader is left to ponder who the protagonist’s nemesis is? God, polio, the protagonist himself, death? Only three chapters long, Nemesis tells the distressing story of circumstances beyond one’s control taking over one’s life, and ultimately devastating that life. Roth examines the emotional gamut that we also felt with Covid-19: denial, fear, panic, anger, guilt, anguish, pain and grief.

Nemesis’s protagonist, Bucky Cantor, is an athlete, phys ed teacher and summer playground director overseeing 90 boys at the Chancellor Ave playground in Newark, NJ’s Weequahic neighborhood. During the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark" in the summer of 1944, “when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb and polio” (1), a fictionalized polio epidemic rages through the neighborhood, just as WWII rages through France and the Pacific. Much to his humiliation, Cantor "because of poor vision . . . was one of the few men around who wasn't fighting in the war"(2). “At twenty-three, he was, to all of us boys, 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.” (3) Cantor made the choice to wage war against a dreadful outbreak of polio affecting his playground boys. The plot runs the gamut of emotions from the opening pages when Mr. Cantor successfully faces off against 10 Italian “boys” who came to the playground to “spread polio” through to his eventual desolation and isolation by age 50.

By the end of the novel, Mr. Cantor has lost all feelings of self-worth, his will to live and to overcome adversity. He made a life decision that would change his life forever. “If only he’d stayed, he would never have had to walk out on his kids and look back for a lifetime at his inexcusable act.” (4). “His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one God-head, as in Christianity, but of two – a sick f-ck and an evil genius” (5) “The guilt in someone like Bucky may seem absurd but, in fact, is unavoidable” (6) “The only way to save a remnant of his honor was in denying himself everything he ever wanted for himself” (7) In the end, Bucky Cantor was unable to overcome his nemesis.

Nemesis is a powerful book, one that will stay with you for some time. Roth’s sentence structure and ability to bring his hometown of Newark to life in 1944 is uncannily skillful and masterful, and is why I included so many quotes from the book.

About Philip Roth:

Philip Roth (1933-2018) was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle awards for The Counterlife, National Book Awards for Goodbye Columbus (at age 26) and Sabbath’s Theater, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral.

Roth also received lifetime achievement awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Gold Medal in Fiction), the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Award and the PEN/Bellow Lifetime Achievement Awards. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize for his body of work.

QUOTE: “The ‘longest, saddest day of my young American life,’ said Roth, was April 12, 1945, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage just as the war in Europe was coming to an end. Roth was among the crowd in downtown Newark who stood, bereft, as the funeral train ‘passed with lumbering solemnity’ during its trip from Washington to Hyde Park.” Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey, 2021.
PLAY: In March 2023, a stage production of Philip Roth’s Nemesis directed by Tiphaine Raffier opened at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris
MOVIE: In May 2023, it was announced that Panamanian film-maker Abner Benaim will direct a feature adaptation of Roth’s Nemesis
NOTES: The Newark, NJ polio epidemics occurred in 1916 and 1952

WORKS CITED

Nemesis by Philip Roth, 2010; pages referenced below.
NPR interview 10/5/2010 All Things Considered - Roth characterizes the 1944 polio outbreak in Newark, NJ featured in Nemesis as "fictionalized but plausible."
Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey, 2021
Pamela Sergey