“Nemesis” continues Philip Roth’s recent streak
Philip Roth writes stand-alone novels that nevertheless coalesce into series. Over the course of his career, those have included the Zuckerman novels, the Roth novels, and the Kepesh novels. In 2006, Roth began his latest seriesa continuing collection of short novels known as “Nemeses.” So far, the series had included Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbling (2009). The fourth book in the series, simply titled Nemesis, was released on October 5, 2010. The books do not have recurring characters, but rather recurring themes: aging, community, love, and death. This entry follows Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director struggling to maintain his work during a 1944 polio epidemic in Newark.Of course, the New Jersey polio epidemic is imagined, but Roth is no stranger to alternate history. He often blurs the line between fact and fiction, both on a personal and a historical scale. The story here is richly imagined, and Bucky becomes one of Roth’s most personable narrators in recent memory. The book is a tragedy, but not a melodrama, and Roth makes sure the story is worth hearing. Rest assured that you don’t need to have read any of his other books to take in this oneit makes a worthy starting point for checking out the rest of Roth’s back catalogue, now totaling 31 books.Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was released in 1959a collection including the title novella and five short stories. The book won the 1960 National Book Award and established him as a biting satirist with a talent for cultivating controversy. His 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint was his first big hit, in part due to the sexual candidness of its narrator. However, the book also illustrated Roth’s fascination with the blurring of fact and fiction and the malleability of formal literary structure. Many elements of the book stem from Roth’s own life, and the novel takes the form of a monologue delivered to the narrator’s psychoanalyst. The author has won a number of awards over his career, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel American Pastoral.