There's nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.

The gnomic sentence above could have served as the epigraph to Roth's masterpiece American Pastoral, a novel to which this absolutely gorgeous and deeply troubling novelette is, I believe, a terrific B-side. Like Swede Levov in Pastoral, protagonist Bucky Cantor is an upstanding citizen of his mid-20th-century Jewish New Jersey community, athletically gifted and respected by all; and like Swede, Bucky finds himself thrown into the kind of personal crisis in which everything he thought he knew -- about himself, about the world, about God -- is violently cast into doubt, a crisis that leads to his undoing. For Swede, the catalyst for such a crisis was an act of terrorism perpetrated by his daughter; for Bucky it's a polio epidemic afflicting the children of Newark in the summer of 1944. In both books, Roth gazes unflinchingly at the effects of inexplicable horror's intrusion into the life of a decent, successful man. But where Pastoral was a devastating sprawl, fussily obsessed with the internal minutiae of a soul in freefall, Nemesis is concentrated and broad, with a big ol' narrative ellipsis between main story and epilogue. That's why I called it a B-side. But the B-side is its own art, and I couldn't ask for a better one than this.

The nemesis of the title is God, as Bucky rails against the injustices of fate like the shipwrecked sailors in Stephen Crane's Naturalist classic "The Open Boat", but it's also Bucky himself; the cruel punchline of his tragedy, which makes it almost sadder than Swede Levov's tragedy, is that in ascribing permanent blame to himself for crimes of which no jury in the world would convict him, he actually becomes the agent of his own downfall, fulfills his own irrational prophecy. The ellipsis, which seems to be bothering some readers here, amplifies the effect of this ironic revelation about Bucky; to fill in the details of his life as they occurred rather than in a retrospective postscript would have been to bloat the book unnecessarily. The writing throughout this book is as sharp as any previous Roth I've read, but it's especially beautiful in the game-changing epilogue and lyrical flashback-coda, an inspired passage that could only have come from someone who's still one of our best writers. Make no mistake: as tempting as it is to make fun of him for his continuing solemn fixation on the verities of aging and mortality (and the ridiculous sex of The Humbling, which I gave three stars but which now seems like execrable self-parody), Roth can still write circles around your favorite novelist -- and Nemesis is so good that Roth himself should still be someone's favorite novelist. You earned these five stars, you depressive old geezer!