Author Philip Roth captured the America of his time at the time just right. That started with the book "Portnoy's Complaint." In it, a partly assimilated Jew experiences the emerging sexual revolution. In his newest work "Nemesis" Roth depicts how a disaster can break some and make others wiser and stronger.
In "Nemesis" the disaster was the polio epidemic in northern New Jersey during World War II. That, of course, could be a metaphor for the recent economic meltdown which took people's jobs, businesses, savings and number-one asset their homes. Some of those people, like anti-hero Bucky Cantor in Roth's novel, will never get on the other side of all that. Others will, sadder and wiser.
Cantor's fatal flaw is that he needs to make perfect sense of what had happened. He does that by making himself a prime mover in it all. He tells himself he caused the polio epidemic. That hubris does him in.
Is the takeaway from "Nemesis" to shrug off the pain and just move on?
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