Another Philip Roth?????????? What's Going On????????????????

                                No, darlings, I am not intending to read the complete oeuvre of Roth.  Having read "Nemesis," that makes eleven of his books I have read.  So, I expect this is where I will end with Roth.

                                 Now, polio was a word bandied about during my early childhood years.  For all that my mother fiercely worried about me, during this period--and she did!!!!!!--I never heard polio enter into her reasons for doing so.

                                   I vividly recall having a polio vaccination in my pediatrician's office.

                                    And I recall Spring of 1965, when I was in fourth grade, where all of us had to show up, on three different times, at the high school gym, in my hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey--the very gym that five years later would become the bane of my adolescence!!!!!!--and take these pink sugar cubes, laced with some kind of drug.  The sugar counteracted much of the medicinal flavor, and all of this somehow related to polio.

                                    Which is why I thought the epidemic was during my childhood years. Only, it was not.

                                      "Nemesis," which takes place in Newark, New Jersey, during the Summer of 1944, is a sad meditation on this time.  This was more my sister's childhood than mine--only we were fortunate enough to be far enough away from Newark.  World War II was also going on, and to witness the decimation of a neighborhood, and then a camp in the Poconos, is too much to bear.

                                         So is the character of Eugene "Bucky" Cantor, a tormented individual from the start, whose anxieties unfold along with the war and epidemic.  I related to him to a point, with all my anxieties and neuroses, but I am not certain I would have made the same--what I consider--detrimental choices that he did.   This is an extremely sobering work, and when I finished it, I had to go out to clear my head.

                                           It is short, a minor Roth gem, compared to some of his larger ones, like
"Sabbath's Theater," and "The Plot Against America."  Roth may be a prick in real life, but on paper he can emerge, when he sets out to, an an artist, many of whose works are worth reading.

                                             As  is "Nemesis."  Don't judge Roth by Alexander Portnoy alone!!!!!!!!!!!!