These three books do have their charms. Roth can write like a painter touching up a scene, dabbing at details until the shapes sharpen. Here he is in Everyman, describing a boy after a swim in the sea:

He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun. Along with the ecstasy of a whole day of being battered silly by the sea, the taste and the smell intoxicated him so that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshly existence.

This is fine writing: the detail about the kid's urge to lick and bite his arm is just right, and a familiar one for readers who grew up in hot climates near the sea. But the trouble with the first three "Nemeses" novels is that these bits of brilliant description aren't enough by themselves to make you care about what's happening to the characters. The characters are flat, cartoonish. Roth skimps you with their stories; he seems to take their fates for granted. He could, perhaps, get away with this if his material was less weighty. But with two of the novels working up to a death, and one of them working backwards from one, he needs to make you mind what happens to these people. When Simon Axler shot himself, I found I didn't really care.

Roth doesn't do this in Nemesis. Published at the age of 77, Nemesis is a remarkable late gift to Roth's readers. It is a great Roth novel. Set amid a polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, the novel boils for 240 pages then spills over in the final section and burns you with the tragedy of Bucky Cantor's life. Roth makes you feel it; like Styron did with Sophie Zawistowska, he rips your heart out and tosses it across the room.

Roth makes Bucky real. He's the 23-year-old playground director whose mother died in childbirth and whose father was a jailed thief. He's the natural leader with a simple, honest demeanour. He's respected by the community and worshipped by his boys. Roth gives this guy the shape he withheld from Simon Axler. He sets Bucky in motion. You can feel for him. Here he is at the funeral of one of the boys killed by polio:

Mr. Cantor could see a few women, wearing broad-brimmed straw hats for protection from the morning sun, bent over and weeding small patches of land adjacent to an advertising billboard. In front of the synagogue a row of cars was parked, one of them a black hearse, whose driver stood at the curb moving a cloth over the front fender. Inside the hearse Mr. Cantor could see the casket. It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

And here he is asking the father of his delightful girlfriend Marcia Steinberg for permission to propose:

He bit into a delicious peach, a big and beautiful peach like the one Dr. Steinberg had taken from the bowl, and in the company of this thoroughly reasonable man and the soothing sense of security he exuded, he took his time eating it, savoring every sweet mouthful right down to the pit. Then, wholly unprepared for the moment but unable to contain himself, he placed the pit into an ashtray, leaned forward, and compressing his sticky hands tightly together between his knees, he said, "I would like your permission, sir, to ask Marcia to become engaged."

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