Philip Roth's avatar

Somehow I don't think I captured what I was trying to get at in yesterday's post on Philip Roth's short novel "Nemesis": the relation between the protagonist, Bucky Cantor, and Roth himself. There are so many levels at which to read this excellent novel: literally, as a great and sad story about a young man who faces an ethical dilemma and makes a decision he will regret for the rest of his life; existentially, about the nature of good and evil and faith and chance in a troubled world allegorically, as a story in which the polio epidemic can also represent other forms of contagion and ostracism: the Holocaust most obviously but also the human need to find scapegoats and to assign blame when confronted with fate, evil, or mischance. And another level as well - Bucky as an avatar for the author, who leaves his insular and inbred Jewish Newark community for a place in the wider world, but then finds himself inevitably drawn back to the world he'd left behind, in fact builds his whole career by repeated exorcism of the ghosts of the world of his childhood, and who as a result is blamed, scapegoated, or ostracized as a traitor to his race and as a hater of the Jews. Bucky in personality is entirely unlike Roth - in fact of all Roth's protagonists the least likely to ever write a comic (or seriocomic, or serious) novel - yet in another way the arc of his life story seems to foretell, or perhaps reenact, Roth's journey as an artist.