Just finished Philip Roth’s Nemesis—a short novel about a polio outbreak in Newark, New Jersey over the summer of 1944.
For a good two-thirds of the book it reads almost like a potboiler, complete with cornball dialogue and stock characters straight out of a Hollywood black-and-white. There’s a growing sense of dread, though, and when what you think is going to happen actually does happen, the novel takes a surprising turn—and before you know it, you’re in the middle of a philosophical throw-down between determinism and free will.
Highly recommended.
