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In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening
the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, and even
death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime
polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented
Newark community and its children.

At the center of NEMISIS is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three year old playground director,
Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and
disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war
alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his
playground--and on the everday realities he faces--Roth leads us through every inch of emotion
such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering,
and the pain.

Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill,
a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos --whose "mountain air was purified of
all contaminants"--Roth depics a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in
his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's
passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood.

Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels,
EVERYMAN, INDIGNATION, THE HUMBLING, and now, NEMESIS: what kind of accidental choices fatally
shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstance?

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