Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground, Roth examines some of the central themes of pestilence: fear, panic, anger, guilt, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Bucky feels guilty because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his close friends and contemporaries. The children are threatened with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death.Īt the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, 23-year-old teacher and playground director Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges. Nemesis explores the effect of a 1944 polio epidemic on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark Jewish community of Weequahic neighborhood. It is Roth's 31st book, "a work of fiction set in the summer of 1944 that tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children." In 2012, Philip Roth told an interviewer that Nemesis would be his last novel. Nemesis is a novel by Philip Roth published on October 5, 2010, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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