Instead, his late-career creative power is emerging in a staccato burst of urgent, short books.
Readers accustomed to the rich complexity of classic Roth – the psychological depth and swarm of realistic details that give such life to his greatest works – will be struck by the master’s turn in Nemesis, by contrast a simplistic moral fable, almost biblical in its unadorned treatment of inescapable catastrophe.
Bucky Cantor is a very good young man, a gifted athlete and hero to all the boys who gather at the playground he is supervising during the summer of 1944 in Rothian Newark, “over in the city’s southwestern corner, the Jewish Weequahic section,” where the author grew up. An orphan who resolutely overcame his disadvantage, Bucky is engaged to marry the accomplished eldest daughter of a prominent and wise local physician. But polio comes to his idyllic schoolyard, and formerly angelic Bucky begins to curse God as the incurable scourge carries off his charges one by one. He shames himself by following his love to a mountain retreat, but sickens nonetheless. The book ends with Bucky crippled by the combined effects of polio and misplaced guilt, bitterly renouncing the last proffered grace.
Roth allows that Bucky is a kind of just-the-facts, stick-man version of Swede Levov, the preternaturally gifted hero of his 1997 Pulitzer-winning masterwork, American Pastoral, whose charmed life spirals into elaborate disaster during and after the social tumult of the 1960s. Another “maniac of the why” tortured by his own rectitude. “Swede Levov wants to find an explanation, just as Bucky wants to find an explanation for the epidemic,” Roth says. “Who caused it? God, that son of a bitch? Or was it me, that son of a bitch? The answer is neither.”
As in so many of his novels, Roth leaves the moral judgments to a barely there narrator – one whose name he struggles to recall 14 months after finishing the book. “I don’t have a position, frankly,” he says, remaining content merely to set up his characters and knock ’em down.
Correction: “Life knocks them down.”
God is a “banal explanation” for the moral mysteries he explores, according to Roth. But considered together, his so-called Nemeses read like nothing so much as dread-inducing variations on the Old Testament Book of Job, in which God appears exactly as Bucky Cantor perceives him, “a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two – a sick fuck and an evil genius.”
“That’s a nice line,” Roth says, complimenting himself on hearing it repeated, but it’s not his view. “If I believed in God I would believe that,” he says, “but I don’t believe in God, so the question is moot.”
The stories share a single “mental cast,” according to Roth. “These four books together have at their centre cataclysms,” Roth says. “Men – they’re all men – caught in cataclysms and destroyed. Every one of them – destroyed.”
Nice.
“I guess that’s the way I’ve begun to see things,” he goes on. “It was not my plan when I began. I just wrote one little book. But there are these cataclysms. ...”
Maybe, he concludes, these are “the writings of an old man.”
A darker vision? “A sense of what’s beyond one’s control, a sense of personal impotence in the face of disasters.”
As experienced in one’s own life? “I’ve survived my share of disasters – so far.”
Roth writes on, novel after novel, immune to the futility he sees looming in the future of the craft – a world without readers. “The novel’s not going to disappear,” he says. “What’s already begun to disappear, and has been disappearing for years, is the readership.” He blames the screens. “It began with the movie screen, then the television screen, and the nail in the coffin was the computer screen. There’s no competing against that.”
