Nemesis by Philip Roth

A review by Morris Dickstein

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that "there are no second acts in American lives," a point confounded by his own best work during the Depression decade. But in our time the great exception has been Philip Roth, who has creatively reinvented himself in every decade. As he entered his sixties in the 1990s, at a time when most writers would be slowing down, he produced half a dozen of his most ambitious books, from the affecting memoir Patrimony (1991) and the outrageously brilliant Sabbath's Theater (1995) to the history-minded trilogy that began with American Pastoral (1997). In the past decade, his career took yet another unexpected turn with half a dozen short novels from The Dying Animal (2001), which could stand as the title of the whole series, to the current Nemesis, his fifth novel in five years. These books are unfailingly dark and grim yet they draw you right in. The rolling periods of his long, sinuous sentences, the uncanny sense of actually being there -- in a world of...

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