When Children Die, Who Is to Blame?

Philip Roth's final novel asks questions that have no good answers. In Nemesis, set during a polio epidemic in 1944 Newark, a young man watches children he's responsible for fall ill and die, and he cannot stop asking why. Is it God's punishment? Random chance? Somehow his fault? The questions consume him far more than the disease itself ever could.

Eugene "Bucky" Cantor is a twenty-three-year-old playground director in the Weequahic section of Newark, a close-knit Jewish neighborhood. He's a javelin thrower and weightlifter, strong and dedicated, defining himself by his duty to the children in his care. But his poor eyesight has kept him out of World War II while other men serve overseas - a fact that gnaws at him constantly. Then polio arrives, and Bucky must watch helplessly as the children on his playground start getting sick, some dying, some left paralyzed. His strength means nothing against an invisible enemy.

The Playground and the Italians

When youths from an Italian neighborhood hit hard by the epidemic show up at Bucky's playground and spit on the pavement as a provocation, he acts as protector. He confronts them, forces them to leave, then makes sure the spit is cleaned with hot water and ammonium. Days later, two boys who were at the playground come down with polio. The shock of their senseless suffering begins to wear on Bucky. Did the Italians bring the disease? Was it already there? Is there any meaning to any of it?

The children keep getting sick. Parents are terrified. Rumors spread about how polio transmits - through swimming pools, through hot dogs, through the very air. Nobody knows. Before the Salk vaccine, polio epidemics terrorized communities every summer, and Roth captures that particular dread of a disease nobody understood.

Marcia and Indian Hill

Bucky's fiancée Marcia is spending the summer as a counselor at Indian Hill, a camp in the Poconos. She calls frequently, begging him to leave Newark, to take a job at the camp, to escape the epidemic. He refuses at first - how can he abandon his children? But after speaking with Marcia's father, who gives his blessing for the engagement, Bucky proposes marriage over the phone and agrees to come to Indian Hill.

The camp is paradise. Cool mountain air instead of Newark's suffocating summer heat. No polio cases. Each night Bucky and Marcia canoe to a secluded island and make love. He forms a friendship with Donald Kaplow, a junior counselor he helps with diving. For a brief time, Bucky can breathe.

Then Donald comes down with polio - the first case at Indian Hill. Bucky is certain he brought it. He carried death from Newark into this sanctuary.

The Weight of Irrational Guilt

What makes this novel unsettling isn't the disease itself but Bucky's response to it. He cannot accept randomness. He cannot accept that children die for no reason, that tragedy strikes without meaning. So he searches for blame - in God, in himself, in fate - and the guilt he accumulates becomes its own kind of paralysis.

Bucky contracts polio days after Donald. He survives but loses the use of his right leg. When Marcia wants to marry him anyway, he refuses. He insists she leave him and find a non-crippled husband. He never marries. Twenty-six years later, when the narrator Arnold Mesnikoff - one of the boys from the Weequahic playground who also contracted polio - finds him, Bucky still believes he was chosen by a cruel God to destroy the playground children and carry the disease to the camp.

Structure as Tragedy

This is explicitly a tragedy in the classical sense. The narrator tells us early that things won't end well. We watch Bucky make choices that seem reasonable but lead inexorably toward destruction. His flight from Newark to Indian Hill, intended as escape, becomes the very thing he can never forgive himself for. Character is fate, the Greeks said, and Roth structures the novel to prove them right.

The sense of doom hanging over everything gives the reading experience a particular weight. You want to warn Bucky that his guilt is misplaced, that he's heading toward a cliff. But the narrator already knows where this ends.

Admiration Without Love

I admire this book - its craft, its intelligence, its willingness to sit with unanswerable questions about suffering and meaning. Roth was a master, and the skill shows in every page. But I don't love it. The emotional distance, the philosophical heaviness, the protagonist's unchanging rigidity all combine to create a reading experience that's impressive without being moving.

It's the kind of book you're glad you read but wouldn't necessarily recommend unless someone specifically wants Roth exploring fate, guilt, and theodicy through the lens of American history.

Rating: 3.5/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Philip Roth completists, readers interested in 1940s American Jewish life, anyone who appreciates literary fiction tackling philosophical questions about suffering and responsibility.

Skip if: You want emotional warmth from your fiction, philosophical exploration feels too heavy, or you prefer protagonists who change and grow.