Nemesis by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
304 pp., $26
Philip Roth is perhaps the most celebrated of living American writers, the recipient of our most prestigious awards. It says something good about America that this is true of a Jewish writer who has written almost exclusively about Jews for 50 years, whether to contumely or praise.
For decades now, however, it has been almost all praise: far too much, really. For Roth’s greatest contribution—the sheer verve and energy of the often vulgar, always fluent, sometimes astonishingly funny, and always distinctly Jewish narrative voice he created to investigate Jewish life in America—is far behind him. To cite only the most scabrous carrier of that voice, Alexander Portnoy: “Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass—I happen also to be a human being!” Anyone who can get past being offended will see that this is funny, alive, and a pretty sharp summary of Roth’s theme through dozens of books: the struggle of his Jewish characters (and, it would appear, their author) to lead lives even fractionally independent of the Jews’ overwhelming history.
This was Roth’s voice, and his alone. To it, in his best work, he married a mastery of complex structure and the extraordinarily rare ability to play the postmodern game. To draw the reader into the traditional Coleridgean suspension of disbelief, and then promptly to disavow the whole thing as in one way or another “made up,” as if it weren’t all made up in the first place. To set off anew, the once-gulled reader again delightedly dragged along by the sheer creative “let there be” of Roth’s prose. And then to do it once more. At the apex of his powers, Roth could play with the novel’s fictional status as brilliantly as Nabokov in Pale Fire or Vargas Llosa in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
But if Roth’s work has been marked by highlights such as Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Counterlife, there have been many low points. Letting Go and When She Was Good, early detours away from his quintessential subject, the Jews of his boyhood Newark, are mixed at best. The three novels that followed Portnoy— Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel—are failures. Of the many novels from My Life as a Man to Operation Shylock—what we might call Roth’s two postmodern decades—none but The Ghost Writer and The Counterlife truly repays a second reading. It is true that Sabbath’s Theater and particularly American Pastoral—extravagantly praised books—contain long passages of beautiful writing and profundities that may well be connected to Roth’s “discovery” that the counterculture he had celebrated, and of which he was both champion and harbinger, was an unmitigated tragedy. The Human Stain also contains passages of great beauty as well as powerful ideas provocatively treated. But the books of the last decade mark a distinct falling off in both structural mastery and energy of prose.
Nemesis, plain of style and plainer of structure, offers no change of direction. The plain style works best when the material is truly explosive throughout. This is hard to do in a novel, even a short one. One thinks, rather, of the even prose in which Jonathan Swift’s “projector” discusses his eight-page plan for selling Irish babies for their meat and skin, and so boosting the Irish economy. It is the distance between the serene tone and its appalling subject that has earned A Modest Proposal its place as the greatest satire in the English language. There is, in fact, a literary bomb that goes off late in Nemesis, and powerfully so. But by the time it comes, we have waited too long, and been too little entertained.
It is worth noting that James and Faulkner, the great American artists of the endlessly unexploded ordnance (and, I think, among the few American writers Roth would acknowledge as his masters), offer their readers remarkable passages on almost every page. Some passages we read at full jaw-drop, as it were, while we wait for Caspar Goodwood to kiss Isabel Archer, or to discover why Henry Sutpen killed Charles Bon. In Nemesis, Roth actually manages the opposite of James and Faulkner: Where, by patience and cunning elaboration, they make the merely shocking utterly shattering, Roth makes the truly shattering actually bearable, excepting only the surprise at the end.
So much for style. Nemesis’s plot is quickly sketched. Polio stalks Jewish Weequahic in the stifling summer of 1944. Bucky Cantor, a healthy, patriotic young American rejected by the military for poor vision, works as a playground director and soon finds himself trying to keep his charges healthily occupied in the middle of an epidemic. Despite his efforts, however, the disease begins to claim “his” boys one by one, and panic seizes the community. Duty-bound, Cantor rejects his fiancée’s pleas that he flee the city and the virus for the polio-free mountains, where she is a camp counselor. Tired out, and meditating a weekend break at the seaside, he changes his mind on impulse, and heads up into the mountains.
His astonished happiness at his romantic good fortune in the beautiful countryside is intermitted with dreadful guilt at having fled. The epidemic worsens, the playgrounds are closed (closing off, too, the possibility of return, the only avenue that might relieve his guilt), and the book descends into its closing nightmare.
Nemesis’s characters are almost without exception Jewish, and Roth’s relaxedness of style and structure is indicative of a more fundamental relaxation. His characterizations of Jews are largely positive, a phenomenon that first appeared in American Pastoral. Cantor’s fiancée’s father, a prosperous, bourgeois Jewish doctor, is the sanest, wisest, kindest character in the book. The goodness of Cantor’s grandparents, who raised him, is unalloyed, and they are treated without a hint of parody. That the mocking treatment of Jewish boys and girls playing solemnly at an Indian “Grand Council” under the guidance of “Great Chief Blomback” lacks the energy to undermine any of this is another sign of the low energy of the novel.
It is all the more striking, then, that Roth’s subject is one fit to make the most even-tempered modern writer rage. For Roth is haunted by the old, old demon of theodicy, the problem of God in a world full of evil. Roth returns to the question again and again, and it is the occasion for the very few energetic (and profane) flashes Nemesis offers. What other writer could soberly characterize God as “a sick f—k and an evil genius” and hope to be taken seriously by serious readers? It is tasteless, but it makes you sit up and listen. A shame, then, that there is so little else to listen to: Roth simply circles his point—what kind of fiend must God be to visit polio on children?—without much developing it.
We have seen what Roth’s plainness of style has cost. It is here that the simplicity of his structure fails him completely. Even a subplot, the most basic complication of structure, would have allowed for a second view of the theme, a casting of light upon it from a different angle. And this second view always forces a conscientious author to develop his “main” view further, if only as a necessary matter of point and counterpoint.
Critics have sometimes suggested that the details of Roth’s stories are generally subordinate to his “point.” But it is no absolute failing for a writer to have a point, a theme about which he holds an opinion. Milton wrote Paradise Lost to justify the ways of God to men. Roth writes here to denounce them. Theodicy is one of the greatest of literary themes, particularly in a world in which Newton and Darwin have provided earthly explanations for phenomena that powered the argument for so many centuries.
But there is no Darwin in Nemesis, and his absence from a novel about a deadly virus is itself a demonstration of the book’s failure to explore its avowed theme very far. Indeed, so shallow is Roth’s treatment that we are left wondering whether, title notwithstanding, it is a conscious irony that a book so filled with rage at the Jewish God should take its one plot twist straight from Sophocles. One seeks also in vain for allegory, that other beneficiary of the plain style. Can there really be no second story hidden under the tale of a virus striking Jews in 1944? No literate reader can fail to think of Camus’s The Plague, in which rat-Nazis infest Oran. But this, too, Roth has eschewed.
Early in his career, Roth wrote that “the test of any literary work is . . . the depth with which the writer reveals whatever he has chosen to represent.” By his own measure, Nemesis does not merit a passing grade.
Saul Rosenberg is a writer and editor in New York.