Among American fictioneers, Roth is an antagonistic and imperious prodder. He’s an ironist with insight, particularly into the American condition, subsection male, sub-clause Jewish. His obsessions began and will likely end with sex and death. These are underwritten with philosophic angst, a lacerating if creative exposition of Philip Roth in multiple guises and disguises, and disbelief/horror at the cloaks of self-deception in which we all tend to cocoon ourselves. More often than not using his Newark background as a foregrounding theatre, he operates with literary scalpels honed to steel-eyed sharpness to dissect faith, marriage, gender relations, and family.

In his Zuckerman, Roth, and Kapesh franchises, he has exposed the highest aspirations of modern man and his basest behaviours via larger-than-life alter egos. Few others rail with more mockery and sadder sorrow than he at Western delusions, modern derangements, and lost opportunities – the gripes of Roth is more than just a smart-arse headline.

Nemesis is the fourth corner – and possibly cornerstone – in a block of short novels written this century. With the others – Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009) – it forms an investigative suite under the general title Nemeses into the inadvertent events that influence lives, examining just how vulnerable we can be, no matter our intentions and goodwill, when circumstances conspire.

It could be seen as an allegory of innocence lost, set in a Newark neighbourhood a few weeks after D-Day where polio threatens a community already grieving for its sons sent to war. Bucky Cantor, a twenty-three-year-old playground director who grew up motherless, estranged from his gambling-man thief of a father and idolising his immigrant grandfather, is determined to live a life of principle and worth, desperate as a self-perceived outsider to carve a niche in regular society. He is in love with the nubile Marcia Steinberg, a doctor’s daughter who, miraculously to Bucky, seems as keen on him. The future is full of promise for this idealistic, energetic man, even if, notwithstanding his poor eyesight, he is stricken with guilt at being home while his best friends are to war. To the summer-holiday neighbourhood kids he mentors, he is an heroic figure.

When a polio epidemic starts to pick off his students, Bucky begins to blame his own inadequacies and spiritual qualms as somehow influencing the situation. Full of religious doubt, he rails against the God ‘who made the virus … who kills children with lunatic cruelty’. As the toll mounts, such certainties as he has begin to crumble. In the same way as he pored over military reports from Europe, so he devours the local media, where there are:

terrifying numbers charting the progress of a horrible disease and, in the sixteen wards of Newark, corresponding in their impact to the numbers of the dead, wounded and missing in the real war. Because this was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste and damnation, war with the ravages of war – war upon the children of Newark.

Today, it is hard to imagine just how terrifying polio was. Then, no one knew why it flourished. Before Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine in 1955, polio had by the 1940s become America’s most feared disease, the source of parental nightmare and social panic. It terrified because it was so arbitrary, because most of its victims were under ten, and because it struck across class and geographic boundaries.

In terms of fatalities, though, it was not as lethal as popular opinion projected: among children, its death rate was one-third of the annual cancer toll, one-tenth of those killed in accidents. But where it didn’t kill, polio maimed, condemning tens of thousands to wheelchairs, or a life on crutches or in leg braces.

Nemesis captures the pervading panic, the incomprehension that makes ordinary people behave illogically as they search for scapegoats and alleviation. The Jewish community of Bucky’s neighbourhood suffers from prejudice, given that it has the highest toll of polio incidents in the city. Even when Marcia entices Bucky to a Pennsylvanian paradise of clean air and her sensual charms, he finds no escape.

Roth, as always, is an unsentimental analyst, pinning his butterflies with forensic thoroughness. His prose is deceptively unvarnished, and few others paint such in-depth characterisations with so few brushstrokes. In full flight, he is a poet of prose. The tale unravels with unremitting direness, with a twist or two for added depth. For Bucky, the centre cannot hold and his ethical idealism disintegrates. His aspirations and hopes, as well as his athletic and social nobility, end up as twisted and crippled as the bodies of polio victims.

I wanted to like this book, and there is much in it to admire. In the end, I did not dislike it, which is vacillating faint praise. It is Rothian enough to have you whistling in admiration at some sections, but it is not the fully integrated work of the master in full flight. Yet Roth in second gear is still worth reading, even if, despite its honourable intent, Nemesis is less than the sum of its parts.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010