Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Helle, meet Philip. Philip, meet Helle. Except of course, Philip Roth has not met me � but I have certainly met him. His is one those names that have been hovering on my horizon for years, but after abandoning Portnoy’s Complaint years ago (vowing that I’d get back to it when I was a more mature reader), I kept putting it off, suspecting he wasn’t really my kind of thing. I’m still not sure that he is, but I’m glad to have met him.

The novel is a portrait of polio and its ravaging effects in 1940s America, more specifically in a Jewish neighbourhood in Newark during the summer of 1944. As we know, polio was a nasty disease that attacked mainly children, sometimes paralyzing them, sometimes killing them. For years, nobody had any idea of how it spread, and fear became a constant side-effect. This is the background for the story, as the children around a sweltering Newark playground are trying to pass the summer while Bucky Cantor, their athletic mentor and friend, tries to ward off the epidemic and keep up everybody’s spirit. He begins to wonder what kind of god would do something like this to children and gradually ponders life choices that may or may not have cataclysmic results (hence the title).

Meanwhile, Bucky’s girlfriend is at a safe summer camp up in the cooler mountains, insisting that he join her. Their love is palpable, their happiness an almost too-happy antidote to the horror of the polio epidemic, not to mention the war in Europe, which Bucky couldn’t join because of poor eyesight. His best friends are there, and though he feels guilty for not being able to sign up, he tries to make a difference at home. But how does he choose between the children who are caught in the maelstrom of polio and his girlfriend who offers him the glimpse of a life he had previously only dreamed of?

The novel began quietly and seemed, at first, to be a general description of polio. I was mildly interested. Then Bucky entered the story, and things perked up. But Bucky doesn’t offer much in the way of interiority, and though it’s well written with sentences like:

The four o’clock sun was no less punishing than the twelve o’clock sledgehammer.

The lake was fed by natural springs. The words sounded like the name of an earthly wonder: natural springs � yet another way of saying “no polio�.

there is something flat or wooden about the storytelling. I was almost the only one in my reading group who liked the novel; everyone else felt more or less unmoved by it despite the topic. It partly has to do with Bucky’s somewhat insipid character, I believe, and his overly responsible, guilt-ridden take on life but also the aforementioned lack of true interiority. Mainly, though, it has to do with the narration. The first person narrator who begins the novel doesn’t show itself again until the end when the novel falls flat on its face to me because the voice simply tells us what happened. This framing device had the effect of sucking out the life of the rest of the story to me and left me deducting a star (which had tentatively been there for a while).

A pretty good and interesting book about a topic that I’d never read about before. It must be one of the only novels that take place between 1939 and 1945 which is not about World War II. That alone makes it an interesting portrait of a time. So thanks for the story, Philip. Not sure when we’ll meet again.