We hear a lot about duty these last days of May. Patriotic duty. Those who answered the call to duty. Extended duty. Duty to God and country.
Philip Roth's latest novel, Nemesis, speaks to duty in the broad, Kantian sense. But Roth comes to different conclusions than Kant. Acting out of a sense of duty -- answering the call of good will -- can have both good and bad consequences. Nemesis, through no fault of its protagonist, emphasizes the bad.
The book, last in a series now billed Nemeses: Short Novels, visits an America some 65 years gone but with contemporary parallels. Its about a sense of duty felt by a man left at home during wartime, his obligation to social values during natural plague and disaster as well as turning on hints of ethnic and class divides.
For playground director Bucky Cantor, duty is everything. And while he (mostly) makes the right choices when it comes to duty, he cannot always control the consequences of his choices. Doing the right thing, like shaking a hand, can have disastrous consequences.
It's summer 1944 and Bucky, spared service in World War II because of his poor vision but otherwise a fit physical specimen, manages a Newark playground while the city is in the midst of a polio epidemic. While his friends fight in Europe, Bucky feels the sense of duty imparted by his grandfather's admonishment to “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand for himself as a Jew.” This is not as easy as it sounds.
Urged by his girlfriend to leave the city to escape its "equatorial heat" and the epidemic, Bucky instead feels it his obligation to stay with the children, keeping them active and involved as much of the city faces quarantine. When Italian teenagers visit the playground, Bucky defends his kids, wiping away the spit left behind by the bullies from a hard-hit part of the city. His bravest act comes when he shakes the hand, when it is offered, of a kid with questionable hygiene.
Bucky, pulled by his devotion to his girlfriend and parents, eventually succumbs as polio spreads into the Jewish neighborhood. He takes the job upstate. Almost immediately, he feels a sense of betrayal. Fate takes over and his choice has terrible consequences for him and those around him. By the end of the book, the existential similarities to Albert Camus' The Plague no longer matter. Bucky's sense of duty, now perverted and full of self-pity, destroy most of the sympathy we'd felt towards him.
Roth hints frequently at what lies in store for his protagonist. His clever narrative (we don't learn until the final chapter who is narrating the tale) and impeccable, descriptive phrasing push readers along to see if suspicions are verified. In the end, God is either cruel or missing and a sense of duty born of good will has terrible consequences. A moral imperative? Don't fear your inclinations. There's no knowing --good or bad -- what nature has in store.
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