“Nemesis” by Philip Roth: A brief review

I doubt I ever made the connection that polio and World War II overlapped, leaving families vulnerable on two fronts. Philip Roth’s latest book, Nemesis, takes the reader to a fictional polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey, during the summer of 1944. This short-ish book (280 pages) centers on the misfortunes of Bucky Cantor, a strikingly mature and honorable young playground director who has been classified 4-F: unacceptable for military service. The plainness of Roth’s characters and the emotional restraint he uses laying out one sad event after another give the early sections of Nemesis a factual, journalistic quality. Roth reports the cruel intersection of war and disease evenhandedly, while drawing the reader’s sympathy for the principled Mr. Cantor. 
Nemesis by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, $26)