Nemesis

　　In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifyingepidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey citywith maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, and even death. Thisis the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book:a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect ithas on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and itschildren.　　At the center of NEMISIS is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-threeyear old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower andweightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed withhimself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in thewar alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas aspolio begins to ravage his playground--and on the everday realitieshe faces--Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such apestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, thebewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.　　Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besiegedNewark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high inthe Poconos --whose "mountain air was purified of allcontaminants"--Roth depics a decent, energetic man with the bestintentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic.Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage intopersonal disaster and no less exact about the condition ofchildhood.　　Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four ofRoth's late short novels, EVERYMAN, INDIGNATION, THE HUMBLING, andnow, NEMESIS: what kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life?How powerless is each of us up against the force ofcircumstance?