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Nothing rhymes with ‘polio’

Don’t mention Polio. It’s the dirty word on the empty streets and playgrounds of Weequahic, Newark. The fathers and brothers and eldest sons are on the battlefields of occupied France in the summer of 1944, and the Keep Calm And Carry On mentality is having to deal with the outbreak of an illness that puts the under-15s at just as much risk. So don’t mention any of it – try not to think about it.
This is the strategy of the classically manly, Don-Draper-esque Bucky Cantor, the only man in the suburb, and surrogate father to the children who use the playground he watches over. He works out. He throws javelin. All the kids want to grow up into his broad chest and wide shoulders. He referees baseball games, stops the boys from getting in the way of girls playing jump rope, takes them to the malt shop to escape the midday sun, tries to stop them drinking out of each others soda bottles, and definitely, definitely, doesn’t say anything about- well, you know.

The theme of Philip Roth’s Nemesis is power and responsibility – what is power, what do we do with it, what can we do with it, what can’t we do with it, why does this scare us, what does that make us? The titles of the books in the series tell a story. Everyman. Indignation. The Humbling. Nemesis. Personal battles, personal motivations, personal defeat. It’s the war novel for the war at home. The same fear, the same resilience, the same inadequacy against something bigger than you, tougher than you, something that’s killing the people around you, and that you don’t know how to stop.

So the scale of the book matches the scale of the conflict. A single summer, a single problem, a single man. A community of a few dozen Jews, their lives structured around their 2.5 kid families, in a section of a suburb small enough for quarantine to be the whispered eventual outcome. The threat is ever-present, inescapable, and stifling.

Everyone is afraid. They’re afraid for the children. The outbreak is targeting the sort-of-young – those on the cusp of adolescence and about to be forced to grow up more quickly than any 12 year old should have to.

Bucky’s here because he knows, clearly, what he should do, what he thinks he has to do. He’s here, in Weequahig, fighting a disease that nobody understands, where his broad chest and wide shoulders can’t do anything. His best efforts are trying to keep the kids outside and active, and even this he isn’t sure is a good thing, and not just helping the outbreak continue. The parents lose their faith in him over time, and the numbers dwindle until there’s barely enough to field teams for baseball games anymore. It’s the unwinnable fight. And Bucky has to try not to think about the sweetheart safe in the countryside, about how easy it would be to quit and leave, how the draft can’t touch him, how nobody could stop him from walking away, from leaving the sick and the dying and the soon-to-be-dead in these suburban trenches.

This deliberation forms the spiritual body of the novel. 240 pages, with German autobahns for margins, so there isn’t much room for anything else except his contemplation. It’s a meditation. The archetype of the hero and the shadow of responsibility. I can’t remember the last time I read anything that didn’t involve vampires or boy wizards wherea protagonist actually acted completely selflessly with confidence, but the ideal is still out there. It’s the ideal he has to, at least, be seen to embody, for the sake of those depending on him, regardless of how he feels inside.

Is it selfish to walk away from a fight you can’t win? Is it selfish not to want to watch children get sick and paralyzed when they shouldn’t even be dealing with this in the first place? The parents get by propped up by the twin crutches of God and Family – things that Bucky finds it impossible to fall back on. All he has is responsibility, and the gut feeling that somehow, though he can’t sign on himself, Weequahic has become his personal France.

Time, Gentlemen. So. It’s good – great even. A serious consideration of the burden of responsibility in a fight you don’t stand a chance of winning maybe isn’t the best thing to pick up if you feel as pessimistic about Finals as I do. On the other hand, maybe it is. The closing chapters tie a ribbon around the themes and messages, providing more than enough to think about. But then – £16 for 240 pages. The rest of the series is available in paperback. Which might be what you’d call a more sound investment. And actually, novellas that feel like the book equivalent of 2-act plays are a decent format for the Oxford lifestyle. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon before the week of work. Go on. Be a man. Read him.

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