Thursday, September 25, 2014

Nemesis

This Philip Roth novel is earnest, direct, and even a bit old-fashioned. I can imagine this same plot and themes being handled by Dreiser (more expansively) or Anderson (more floridly). The subject is a polio outbreak in Newark in the summer of 1944, so there are also faint echoes of Camus's The Plague. In all, a satisfying and bleak work.

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