Pretty brutal. I’m ashamed to admit this is the first Roth I’ve read — my mom sent this to me — but based on his reputation and my sense of the book, it’s hard for me to imagine this is among his best.
The problem is really just length. Roth wants to throw together some research about summer camp and polio and musings about theodicy. The polio asserts itself through the decimation of various basically interchangeable children surrounding the protagonist, who’s a youth educator. But he’s a flat and boringly noble character, devoid of psychology aside from overdeveloped senses of duty and guilt. These ensure that polio will destroy him utterly, even after the crisis of the epidemic has passed. And that could could be interesting.
But instead of that tragic flaw’s artful revelation, the dynamics of it are dumped on us by the narrator in the book’s last ten pages. It feels rushed and unnecessary. Those ten pages are solid, and include this gut-punch about bitterness:
“I’ll never be me as I was me in the past. I’ll be this instead for the rest of my life. I’ll never know delight again.”
Oof. Preach. Anyway it’s more of a sermon than anything else.
Still, great prose and a quick read. It’s really just a novella, though. Could easily have been a proper novel but you get the feeling the author’s heart wasn’t in it.
