Philip Roth’s recent novels have often gestured playfully towards the idea of a serene late style. Simon Axler in The Humbling (2009) broods on Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech from The Tempest; Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s most famous mask, sets a scene in Exit Ghost (2007) to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs — music chosen “for the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity … The composer drops all masks and, at the age of 82, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.” Do these references mean that Roth, who is now 77, is abjuring furious artifice for a sagelike calm? Of course not. Late Roth has more in common with the late Ibsen described in an essay by Edward Said: “An angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.” Said called this kind of style, which he found deeply interesting, a “deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against.”
Roth’s fifth novel in as many years comes with a reorganized Books by Philip Roth page. Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling have been plucked from their old home under Other Books and assigned, along with Nemesis, to Nemeses: Short Novels. Perhaps these four books are now a quartet, to be published in single volume down the line. If so, they make a harsh and challenging one. Everyman, a stark, ferociously controlled account of the life and death of an anonymous New York ad man, with an emphasis on the death part, is difficult to fault. Indignation and The Humbling, on the other hand, are jaggedly assembled, red herring-littered books, held together mostly by Roth’s buttonholing intensity. “The omnipotence of caprice. The likelihood of reversal. Yes, the unpredictable reversal and its power,” a character rants in The Humbling. Individuals being destroyed by a cosmic caprice to which their errors of judgment are merely a garnish: This seems to be the tragic model in these two books.
Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, the central character in Nemesis, is another of these faintly struggling figures. He’s also an uncomplicated, relentlessly nice young man, so the reader knows that he’ll be destroyed with a special vehemence, which gives the long pileup of his admirable attributes an increasingly menacing quality. The first member of his family to go to college, he’s been exempted from the draft — it’s 1944 — on account of his poor eyesight, to his great regret. A natural athlete, devoted equally to civic well-being and the Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey, he teaches gym and serves as a playground director, in which capacity he’s kind, patient and revered by his students. And if that’s not enough, his girlfriend, Marcia, is beautiful, clever and just as nice.
The first half of this shortish novel introduces Bucky in the middle of a summer polio epidemic, a life-changing event before a vaccine was developed. Bucky is referred to here as “Mr Cantor,” indicating that the otherwise non-childlike narrator, who doesn’t show his face until later on, is remembering him partly from a child’s point of view. From this double perspective, we’re shown Mr Cantor taking his duties seriously as the children in his care begin to sicken and die and the epidemic tests the community’s cohesion. “Why don’t they use disinfectant? Disinfect everything,” distraught Jewish mothers cry out in the street. Elsewhere, there’s talk of blaming the Jews for the outbreak. In secret, Bucky begins to hold a malevolent God responsible; he also comes to see his job as his personal Second World War.
In the course of this section — part sinewy historical fiction, part inscrutable moral fable — Roth increases the tension by piling on even more niceness. Marcia’s father, a doctor, not only calms Bucky down (“A misplaced sense of responsibility can be a debilitating thing”) but executes “a little jig” when asked for his daughter’s hand. “You have it,” he says. “I couldn’t be more thrilled.” Then, just as hysteria is peaking in Newark and Bucky is looking unlikely to withstand another terrifically executed visit to a grieving family, Marcia calls from Pennsylvania. A job as waterfront director has abruptly been vacated at the American Indian-themed Jewish summer camp where she’s working. If he takes it, and it’s as good as his, there’s an island they can go to be alone in the evenings — a sexual idyll far from the broiling, death-filled city. Bucky, with his grandfather’s stern spirit at his elbow, says no: His students need him more than ever. A day later, he surprises himself by changing his mind.
As promised, happy children romp all day at Indian Hill in a health-giving natural landscape, a long way from the war in Europe and the polio epidemic. The narrator begins to use the name “Bucky” instead of “Mr Cantor,” reminding the reader that the central character is only 23, and in spite of a lover’s quarrel caused by Bucky’s newfound views on God, the promised sexual idyll comes to pass. Roth also brings in some unexpected comedy, as opposed to scalding irony, in the person of the camp’s owner, Mr Blomback, who belongs to an Indian-inflected outdoor pursuits movement (“one of our country’s greatest achievements”) and likes to make inspirational speeches while wearing a feather headdress. Despite a few conscience-related pangs, Bucky quickly gets wind of “that phantom, future happiness.” Yes, all is well, until suddenly it isn’t.
Unlike Simon Axler, Marcus Messner in Indignation and the unnamed protagonist of Everyman, however, Bucky doesn’t die, though he’s destroyed as an athlete and a sexual and social being. In the final section, the narrator meets him years later, and we’re given to understand that the real catastrophe isn’t what happened in 1944, or even “how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance,” but Bucky’s stance towards these states of affairs. Guilty of no more than bad moral luck, he chooses to condemn both himself and the universe, and the narrator delivers a harsh verdict: “I have to say that however much I might sympathize with the amassing of woes that had blighted his life, this is nothing more than stupid hubris, not the hubris of will or desire but the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation.” The limited central figure — in effect a diminished version of Swede Levov from American Pastoral (1997) — stands condemned as a “maniac of the why” who “has to convert tragedy into guilt.”
Behind this moral argument, there’s a reinvigorated engagement with American Jewish life. Those distraught women (“Disinfect everything”) might remind readers of Portnoy’s mother, and provoke the thought that all that cleaning wasn’t so neurotic after all. There are also questions about the Holocaust, taking place at the same time as the novel’s action: If an epidemic in Newark is “real war too,” as Bucky thinks, then what kind of perspective can be brought to bear on what’s happening in Europe? But in the end, and despite the sometimes bizarre spectacle of Roth setting up uninflected niceness to crush, Nemesis is most memorable as his least contemptuously spun-out story since Everyman. In one of the few positive reviews of The Humbling, the novelist James Lever remarked that the recent novels mostly boil down to “irony and scenery,” and sometimes precious little scenery. Here Roth has got scenery, and even one or two jokes, back in place.
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