Nemesis: A Novel

“Roth’s book has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama.” —The New Yorker

“Painful and powerful…. Somberly but vividly, [Roth] recreates the panic and fear triggered by polio.” —USA Today

In the stifling summer heat of 1944, a terrifying wartime polio outbreak stalks a close-knit, family-oriented New Jersey community and its children.

At the center of Nemesis is 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 Cantor’s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground—and on the everyday realities he faces—Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.

Moving between the smoldering streets of Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children’s summer camp high in the Poconos—whose “mountain air was purified of all contaminants”—Roth 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 Cantor’s passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood.