Nemesis by Philip Roth
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? (p. 154)
Nemesis (2010) is the final novel written and published by Philip Roth (1933–2018). It tells the story of Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, an exemplary phys ed teacher that has to deal with the polio epidemic of 1944 in Newark, New Jersey. The novel touches themes such as chance, honor, pride and fear. It is divided in three chapters.
Roth’s novel is an exploration between the clash of chance, circumstance, against the self-confidence of man. Set during WWII, the polio epidemic that hit the USA in 1944 might seem inconsequential given the big theatre of the war. In that decade the three main fears were: the war, the atomic bomb and polio. Throughout the novel, Bucky struggles to reconcile with the fact that his friends are fighting against the nazis, whereas he is at home in charge of a school playground during summer. But when polio strikes Newark and kids from his playground start getting sick, he’s in a war of its own. “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.” (p. 132).
Over the course of the story, Bucky feels somehow responsible for what’s happening around him. That ends up turning into anger and he finds someone to blame in God. By the end of the third chapter, we’ve seen how Roth built this immaculate character so that he could smash him into pieces inside out. The Bucky we meet at the end of the novel is a disfigured old fellow, merely a remnant of the vigorous phys ed teacher, ripped off of its manhood, its will to live, to overcome. The narrator, a former kid at the playground, shows how Bucky’s anger was misguided from the start. It was not because of God, it was because his own sense of conscience, of responsibility, of self-confidence, was way too high for the circumstances. He thought of himself as the center of the world and chance happened to make him see otherwise.
Roth’s novel seems to say that our excessive pride in defiance of the gods (or chance or whatever) breeds: Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution. Nemesis, a long-standing rival. Nemesis, the inescapable agent of our downfall. We are our own nemesis.
Side note: reading this book post Covid pandemic is like reliving it all over again. The fear of a mysterious virus that looms in the air, the frenzy of the public, the guilt of being a positive carrier and the sense that everything changed afterwards, are just some things that are deep inside our collective experience after the months we endured of lockdown. Roth paints Bucky as a Greek hero only to make him a cripple, and shows in the process how a lot of our sense of honor and responsibility is a bunch of bs if we’re not capable of cracking a joke to ourselves. Life happens and it’s not because some deity is playing crisscross with us that we sometimes win or lose. That’s just life. The force of circumstance will find us in our best or worst shape, but is up to us to make that into something.
Roth, Philip. (2010). Nemesis. Vintage Books. USA. 280 pages.
