** spoiler alert ** SPOILER ALERT: Plot points are revealed in pursuit of polio enlightenment.

The villain in this novel is polio, the disease that transported my Dad from a congested Brooklyn neighborhood to his first exposure to a working farm and the disease that would return fifty years later to ultimately claim him.

Roth's novel, set in Newark, NJ in the summer of 1944, looks at pre-vaccine polio through the eyes of protagonist Bucky Cantor, a school gym teacher, mentor and coach, kept from service in World War II by his poor eyesight. Bucky's secret humiliation at being unfit for military service and his enormous empathy and courage in the face of the terror and injustice of polio, frame the novel's theme.

As Bucky embraces the opportunity to replace a drafted camp waterfront director at a camp in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, I can almost feel my Dad's epiphany as he embraced the rustic environment of Haverstraw, NY where he was sent for rehabilitation. My Dad often said that polio gave him the opportunity to learn that he wanted to be a farmer. I ran free in the woods of Guilford, CT because my Dad embraced the natural world.

Roth writes:
"He [Bucky] had always lived in a city flat . . . and had never before felt on his skin that commingling of warmth and coolness that is a July mountain morning . . . There was something so enlivening about spending one's workday in this unbounded space . . . something so thrilling about going to sleep beneath a blitzkrieg of thunder and lightning and awakening to what looked like the first morning ever that the sun had shown down on human activity."

But, as a writer, I knew Roth was setting me, the reader, up for a crushing blow.

Roth skillfully weaves words into a tapestry of emotion:
". . . the two clung to each other with their unparalyzed arms, swaying together to the music on their unparalyzed legs, pressing together their unparalyzed trunks . . ."

Although I anticipate that our hero will battle polio, I'm still rooting for Bucky.

Roth is like a feline hunter, playing with its prey, backing off, pouncing again. He keeps the tension alive as Bucky learns of the battlefield death of his buddy Jake, amid the dazzling description of indigenous skills revived by author Ernest Thompson Seton, (later founder of Boy Scouts), central to this camp's infrastructure.

My heart breaks for Bucky, as the powerless witness to a world ravaged by disease and war. When Donald, a camp counselor and promising diver mentored by Bucky, suddenly becomes ill, I have to set the book down. I suspected this, because my Dad had gone swimming in Coney Island and could not get out of bed the next morning.

But in Roth's hands, Donald, who gets chills the first night, returns to dive the second night. Roth weaves one slightly foreshadowing hint of possible trouble in one imperfect dive, but that could also be interpreted as Donald's learning curve. Foreshadowing, done well, is seamless.

Since I began reading NEMESIS, I've watched closely for telltale hints of polio to come. Roth's description of healthy limbs, promising athletes, and innovative thinkers is subtle, but I know what's coming. My paternal grandmother believed that celebrating achievement and success tempted a god demanding humility. Or maybe growing up in a world of Polish/Russian pogroms enhanced her vigilance.

I'm reading NEMESIS with her heightened sense of vigilance, which I'm sure borders on paranoia. Bucky's guilt over leaving Newark for the Poconos and his devastation by Donald's polio attack has Bucky convinced he's a polio carrier. I feel Bucky's paranoia and although I know that the polio vaccine will be available in the future, I'm still transported back to the 1940's when polio refused to reveal a pattern to its war-like devastation. Why did polio kill some people, maim others and leave others alone? In 2010 we still do not know.

As the story flashes forward, Bucky, having incubated the virus, possibly for weeks, finally succumbs to polio. Roth describes the Sister Kenny treatment that my Dad also had. I'm convinced Sister Kenny is the reason so many people regained movement of their paralyzed limbs.

Polio's cruelty lies in its unpredictability. Bucky, more severely stricken than my Dad, does regain most of his mobility, but I'm left with the impression that the healthier the body, the more viciously polio attacks.

The worst shock in Roth's "strand the protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at him" approach is that Bucky loses more than one arm and one leg to polio. He loses his definition of himself. I was angry at Roth for that until one of Bucky's former students, also a polio survivor, explains that Bucky was an adult, with a teaching career and had largely defined himself by his athletic prowess. Bucky does not seem to realize the mental skill he'd developed to be able to succeed athletically.

Once Bucky's mind latches on to the idea that he was a "polio carrier and disease spreader" - is that even possible? - polio claims him mentally as well as physically.

Perhaps because my Dad was only 15-years-old, still in High School, his adult life not yet begun, polio impacted his life path, but never his choices. Unless Dad was wearing swim trunks, you'd never look at him at think he was physically deformed.

I'm trying hard to maintain my respect for Roth's deft storytelling, while dealing with my anger at Bucky for losing to polio. How dare polio win out over love? But we are all different and Roth did what I, as a reader, wanted him to do: deepen my perspective on an aspect of my Dad's life that he rarely spoke about at length.

I'm personally invested in the theme and angry about the final plot twist, but NEMESIS is one of those books I will read again.