The Long, Hot Summer of '44
About halfway through Philip Roth’s quietly riveting new novel, its protagonist finds himself in the Poconos, far—it would seem—from the polio epidemic that is scouring the streets of Newark in the roasting summer of 1944. Bucky Cantor is 23 years old, a phys-ed teacher and—until this point in the novel—playground director for two schools, Chancellor Avenue School and the newly opened Weequahic High. But Weequahic has a very different mood this summer than the one evoked so notoriously in Portnoy’s Complaint; Roth has passed through the spectrum from sex to death.
Polio is no phantom. Early on in the tale, two boys, including Alan Michaels, a beloved 12-year-old star of classroom and ball field, are killed by the disease, and children and parents are rightly fearful of this epidemic, its cause then still unknown, a vaccine as yet undiscovered. “It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.”
At first Bucky is determined to do his duty on the playground; he can’t serve in the army, much to his chagrin, because of poor eyesight. This is his service. In spite of his eye problem and the lack of height that stopped him from being a star of the basketball team, Roth portrays him as a heroic, handsome specimen of manhood: “His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on.” But his strength of will can’t halt the disease; and so Bucky breaks his vow of service and joins his girlfriend, Marcia, at a summer camp in the mountains. Jobs like playground director and camp counselor are easy to come by, with all his friends gone off to war. He’s lucky, and he knows it. But the polio epidemic causes him to doubt the certainties that have upheld him throughout his young life—his notion that the world is somehow just and somehow fair, and that hard work will be rewarded. He has overcome hardship—his mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his grandparents, and at the time the novel begins his beloved grandfather has died.
Until now he has perceived the universe as an orderly place, but polio profoundly changes all that: “He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge with a plate of macaroni and cheese? Why does He place one Weequahic child in polio-ridden Newark for the summer and another in the splendid sanctuary of the Poconos? For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.”
That mystery is the heart of the novel. Late last year I spoke to Philip Roth about his last novel, The Humbling. During our conversation he told me that Nemesis was already finished. We had been discussing how a book finds its author, or the author his book. Roth recalled how the polio epidemic wouldn’t let him alone. “It was a menace when I was a child. All parents were tremendously concerned about it. I mean, people get upset about swine flu, where nothing much can happen to you, but polio could maim you, deform you, kill you or cripple you—and it came from we knew not what.” He described Bucky Cantor, without naming him, and said: “The trick really, and it’s quite a trick, is to find the character who best reflects and demonstrates the subject. I think I found him in this book.”
He was right; he has. Perhaps Bucky Cantor won’t be to everyone’s taste; he is no Nathan Zuckerman, no David Kepesh, no Mickey Sabbath. The extent of his sexual adventure, for instance, consists of cavorting with his beloved Marcia on a deserted island on the camp’s lake. Their mutual loss of virginity, not long before, is described in a manner that can only be called chaste. Cantor is situated, too, in a very particular section of the Roth oeuvre, a literary observation available to anyone who turns to the page at the beginning of this volume headed “Books by Philip Roth.” Nemesis is the fourth volume of a series that shares its title, pulled out to the plural: “Nemeses: short novels.” The series began with Everyman, published little more than four years ago; the next two books, Indignation and The Humbling, followed with near-clockwork regularity.
What unites this run of brief, trenchant books? They alternate between the personal and the political: Everyman and The Humbling focus on the inner lives of their protagonists; Indignation and, now, Nemesis, take in a wider social issue or political circumstance—the Korean War in the former, polio in the latter. But all four address the crucial events that shape the lives of their characters—and, by extension, all our lives. In that way they remind this reader, especially in Nemesis, of fairy tales. If you think that’s a slur, you are mistaken. Fairy tales survive because they are rich, deep sources of moral situations and moral problems, set out in the form of myth.
The polio epidemic stands Bucky Cantor at the crossroads of his life. At first, he faces it with the strength that (just as often happens in fairy tales) gained him his name; Eugene was transformed when, as a boy, he killed a rat with the flat of a shovel—bang—in his grandfather’s store: “It was following this triumph that his grandfather—because of the nickname’s connotation of obstinacy and gutsy, spirited, strong-willed fortitude —took to calling the bespectacled ten-year-old Bucky.”
That strength falters. The polio epidemic causes the needle on his moral compass to swing wildly. At the novel’s beginning, he confidently washes down the sidewalk outside the playground that’s been spat upon by a gang of thuggish Italian boys who claim, “We’re spreadin’ polio.” By the novel’s midpoint, he understands the uselessness of these antiseptic gestures. Polio is as mysterious, as seemingly malevolent, as Horace, “the neighborhood’s ‘moron’” who dogs the boys in the playground hoping for a handshake—a gesture that comes to seem like an invitation to contagion.
So what is Bucky Cantor’s nemesis? Polio? Certainly Roth paints the fear the virus brought to his native Newark with perfect poignancy. The book has a striking quality of tenderness in its depiction of the city’s Jewish community stalked by death. But no. Bucky’s nemesis is your nemesis, and mine too: It is himself, the discovery of his true mettle over the course of this compact, involving novel. It does the reader no favor to give too much away; Nemesis is truly suspenseful in a way that its predecessor, The Humbling, was not. Perhaps that’s because the author’s compassion for Bucky shines clearly, voiced through the book’s narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of the playground boys afflicted by polio. “All at once he heard a shriek,” Arnie says of Bucky as the disease creeps closer and closer. “It was the shriek of the woman downstairs from the Michaels family, terrified that her child would catch polio and die. Only he didn’t just hear the shriek—he was the shriek.”
Erica Wagner is literary editor of The Times of London. She is the author of a novel, Seizure, and is at work on a book about the Brooklyn Bridge in collaboration with the photographer Barbara Mensch.
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